Wouldn’t you love to have an electric car?
They’re clean, green and righteous. And once we
make the switch, we can pull the plug on fossil
fuels, air pollution, imported oil and Middle
Eastern autocrats, and create millions of green
jobs into the bargain.
No wonder progressive governments are so eager to
plow money into electric cars. This week,
Ontario’s McGuinty government (which likes to brag
that Ontario is Canada’s greenest province)
showered Magna International with nearly
$50-million to develop new electric vehicle
technologies. Magna, which is rolling in dough,
admits it doesn’t need the money. But in a world
where capital and jobs are mobile, such gratuities
are expected.
Dalton McGuinty is a true believer in electric
cars. He hopes that, by 2020, 5 per cent of the
vehicles on Ontario’s roads will be electric.
That’s why he’s also plowing money into charging
stations and battery technologies.
There’s just one problem. The fantasy that
electric cars are right around the corner doesn’t
survive even the most cursory reality check. As
Dennis DesRosiers, a leading auto consultant,
points out, consumers simply won’t pay a $20,000
premium for a vehicle that doesn’t go very far,
isn’t very convenient, and runs out of juice as
soon as you turn on the air conditioner.
Consider hybrids. After a decade on the market,
they’ve captured only 3 per cent of sales. To get
to Mr. McGuinty’s 2020 target, green-minded
Ontarians would have to buy at least 100,000
electric cars a year every year, starting right
now. Total U.S. sales of electric vehicles are
about 10,000 a year.
Of course, electric cars aren’t in mass
production yet. And the technology is bound to get
better and cheaper. Right?
Not so fast, says the University of Manitoba’s
Vaclav Smil, who’s among the world’s foremost
scholars of energy economics. Electric cars, he
says, aren’t microchips, and Moore’s law doesn’t
apply. “The myth that the future belongs to
electric vehicles is one of the original
misconceptions,” he writes in his book Energy
Myths and Realities. In an interview, he
notes that recent history is filled with energy
breakthroughs that turned out be duds. Electric
car crazes have come and gone before. Perhaps some
people may remember a Canadian company called
Ballard, which claimed to have developed a
breakthrough fuel-cell technology. Many brainy
people swore that Ballard was the future. It
wasn’t.
Here’s another catch: Electric cars aren’t
necessarily green at all. Electric vehicles
require large amounts of electricity – so much
that Toronto Hydro chief Anthony Haines says he
doesn’t know how he’d get it. “If you connect
about 10 per cent of the homes on any given street
with an electric car, the electricity system
fails,” he said recently.
And if the extra electricity isn’t generated by
renewable energy, then overall carbon dioxide
emissions will go up, not down, Prof. Smil says.
“The only way electric cars could reduce global
carbon emissions would be if all the additional
electricity needed to power them came from
carbon-free energies.” He also makes the essential
point that the world’s energy infrastructure is
based on fossil fuels. Changing that will take
decades.
Please don’t blame me for this splash of cold
water. Blame the greens, whose grasp of basic
consumer behaviour, energy economics and political
realities are shockingly inadequate. The facts
Prof. Smil sets out exist independently of global
warming, which, he believes, is a well-established
reality. But just because the facts are unwelcome
doesn’t make them untrue. Time and time again, the
greens have harmed their cause with their
uninformed fervour and simplistic thinking.
As for cutting down on fossil-fuel consumption,
the future is both bright and dim. The good news
is, improved technologies have brought much better
fuel efficiency – 50 or 60 miles per gallon – well
within our reach. Stricter standards would quickly
pay off big. For that matter, so would persuading
businesses to let workers telecommute twice a week
– a change that would cut more fossil-fuel use
than millions of electric cars.
The bad news is, the worldwide number of cars is
set to double. And not even Mr. McGuinty can
change that.
