This week’s Capital Letter was about the practicality of the EPA’s new electric-heavy-truck rules, a topic that (in part) involves considering how the electricity grid will cope with the twin challenges of decarbonization and the electrification of “everything.” In the Capital Letter, I quoted from a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, but now the Journal has more.
It’s well worth reading the whole thing, but there were a few snippets that caught my eye. These included the fact that most trucks will have to be recharged at night, as drivers would rather drive during the day. Fair enough. Renewables mainly consist of solar and wind. Solar, eh? Last time I checked, that wasn’t at its best at night for some reason. Of course, there is battery storage to partly compensate for that, and it’s reasonable to assume that storage technologies will continue to improve, but we may need rather a lot of improvement.
According to the WSJ:
An electric semi consumes about seven times as much electricity on a single charge as a typical home does in a day. Truck charging depots can draw as much power from the grid as small cities.
Unsurprisingly, the writers of the article look at the cost of this aspect of the great electrification, not least to truckers, and unsurprisingly they are huge. Tax credits will help, but that merely reallocates some of the cost from one wallet to another, that of the government (in other words, taxpayers). It’s just as well the U.S. has low levels of debt and runs a hefty budget surplus.
Doesn’t it?
One little nugget in the report is that Inflation Reduction Act tax credits for electric trucks are not adversely affected if the battery comes from abroad. That’s likely to be good news, economically and geopolitically, for Xi, and it’s yet another reminder that a lot of those green new jobs are going to be created in China.
Speaking of China, the Journal’s article concludes with the observation that the EPA estimates that this part of electrification will reduce the amount of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere by one billion tonnes between 2027 and 2055, a figure of Dr. Evilian grandeur. Somewhat unkindly, the Journal notes that this is “as much as emissions from China and India rose last year alone.”
Oh well.