Houston Chronicle detailed the electric vehicle industry boom across the U.S., quoting is AEE’s Nat Kreamer. Read excerpts below and the full story here (sub req). The story appeared in three other Texas news outlets including LMTonline.
One of the questions that has long plagued automobile executives was whether motorists — after a century of pulling into gasoline stations for a near instant fill up — would be willing to switch to electric vehicles typically requiring hours-long charges.
With electric vehicles constituting less than 3 percent of the global auto sales, that question remains unresolved. Governments and automakers, however, are not waiting for the answer. Confident technological advances will ease consumer concerns, they are forging ahead with plans to convert the majority of new car and light truck sales to electric by the 2030s in an effort to avoid the worst consequences of climate change…
Once electric vehicles begin rolling off factory floors in large numbers, the transition faces another challenge: charging millions of vehicles day in and day out.
Biden pledged on the campaign trail to install 500,000 chargers along U.S. roads and highways. With new fast chargers, an electric vehicle can be fully charged in 10 minutes — about the time it takes to “stretch your legs and get a cup of coffee,” said Nat Kreamer, CEO of the clean energy group Advanced Energy Economy.
Replacing the nation’s more than 160,000 gas stations won’t come cheap. The fast chargers can cost $100,000 each. In addition, upgrading the power grid to handle the increased demand from electric vehicles is likely to be costly…
Biden's $2 trillion climate plan includes investments in modernizing the power grid and advancing battery technology so solar power, for example, could be stored during the day and used at night. Kreamer said there is time to solve such issues.
"The transition time for fleets and passenger vehicles to electric, it's a long enough duration," he said. "The grid is going to be ready."
Read the full story here (sub req).