Insulated from democratic accountability, the administration is imposing it anyway.
The Energy Information Administration (EIA), the statistical arm of the Department of Energy, published the 2023 Annual Energy Outlook in March. As the title suggests, it’s a yearly report that makes long-term forecasts about U.S. energy consumption and production. It takes into account laws and regulations, industry conditions, and projected demand to make a range of forecasts based on different scenarios.
The forecasts extend to 2050. Any long-term forecasts about something as complex as energy should be taken with (more than) a grain of salt. That being said, they’re useful for giving a general sense of how the government thinks energy demand and production will shake out in the future.
In the editorial today about the EPA’s new emissions standards, based on which the EPA wants 67 percent of new vehicles to have zero tailpipe emissions by 2032, the editors asked, “Where is all this extra electricity going to come from?” Such a rapid increase in EVs will require more electricity production, and we’re already seeing, at a time of relatively low levels of EV adoption, state-level no-charge warnings on high-demand days.
The answer to that question according to the Annual Energy Outlook is renewables, by which it means largely solar energy.
The report projects that U.S. electricity-generation capacity will roughly double by 2050 to meet growing demand for power. The report says that the 2022 mix of electricity-generation capacity is 43 percent oil and gas, 17 percent coal, 12 percent wind, 10 percent solar, and 8 percent nuclear, with the remainder from other sources such as hydro and geothermal. The EIA isn’t beholden to green idealogues, and it understands that fossil fuels will remain part of the energy mix for years to come. In its reference scenario for 2050, the baseline forecast, it projects that oil-and-gas capacity will increase by 40 percent and still make up 30 percent of total capacity.
The EIA projects that nuclear will continue its slow decline and remain a rounding error in the overall capacity picture. It projects that coal capacity will decline by 64 percent by 2050 and only make up 3 percent of the total.
A doubling of the electricity-generation capacity is the same as a 100 percent increase. So far, the largest category in current capacity, oil and gas, will see only a 40 percent increase, and nuclear and coal will see a decrease. That leaves wind and solar. Wind capacity is projected to increase by 158 percent by 2050 in the report. That entails that its share of total capacity will increase to 15 percent.
That’s not nearly enough to double capacity overall. (Wind has been in some respects a disappointment to renewables enthusiasts.) The report projects that solar-energy capacity in the U.S. will make up the difference. Between now and 2050, the EIA, in its reference scenario, believes that solar capacity will increase by 636 percent, leapfrogging wind, coal, and oil and gas to become the leading source of electricity-generation capacity in 2050, contributing 37 percent of the total.
The answer, then, in large part, is that the extra electricity for new electric cars is expected to come from solar panels. That’s probably part of the reason why concerns about land ownership are being raised in climate conversations: It will take a lot of land to build that many new solar farms.
The Annual Energy Outlook also projects electric-vehicle adoption as part of its energy forecasts. Currently, it says that EVs have a 6.4 percent market share. By 2050, the reference scenario projects that EVs will have an 18.7 percent market share. Even in the most extreme scenario, with high oil prices, it projects that EVs will make up 28.5 percent of new cars by 2050.
The EPA yesterday said that it wants EVs’ market share to be 67 percent by 2032. This target is not even on the same planet as the EIA’s March forecast, and the two don’t even refer to the same types of EVs. The EPA wants 67 percent of new cars by 2032 to be battery-electric vehicles that take no gasoline at all. The EIA’s definition of EVs in the report includes plug-in hybrids in addition to battery-electrics. Excluding plug-in hybrids, the EIA projects only 14 percent adoption of battery-electric cars by 2050 in the reference scenario and 24 percent in the most extreme scenario of high oil prices.
That means that if the EPA’s new standards are actually met, the projections for electricity-generation capacity to meet demand from EVs will need to be even higher than the EIA report’s estimates. Given the track record of renewables in Germany, where the energy transition is still very much a work in progress but electricity needs are urgent and growing, that will likely mean that U.S. coal and natural-gas plants will stay open longer than currently expected.
The rush to EVs combined with a rush to renewable energy, on the scale the Biden administration wants, is so extreme that even the government’s own numbers don’t support it. Betting everything on an enormous increase in solar capacity while mandating ever-more EVs is a risk that most elected officials probably wouldn’t take — but insulated from democratic accountability, administrative agencies are doing it anyway.