The latest problem with EV charging stations: Power supply



The transition from gas-powered automobiles to electric vehicles has been a gong show, even though Democrat bans on new gas cars have not yet gone into effect. The trouble is not simply that EVs — which require the mining of many times more minerals than required for a conventional vehicle — are less environmentally friendly than promised or that they are both expensive and unreliable.

Electric vehicles require charging stations. Unless Americans are to be confined to 15-minute cities, there needs to be a juiced network of such stations.

The infrastructure is not in place, however, thanks in part to the Biden administration's bungling of its promised national rollout of EV charging stations. The Democratic administration has established fewer than a dozen of the promised 500,000 charging stations across the country.

Even if there was a satisfactory number of active stations, there is no guarantee they would be useful on account of power supply issues.

Last month, the California-based software company Xendee released the results of its survey of leaders "involved in the development, operation, and commercial use of EV charging infrastructure."

75% of respondents said electric grid limitations were a "significant roadblock to the rollout of EV charging infrastructure for commercial EV usage." Despite uncertainty about whether the charging stations will have the power to charge the cars, 84% of fleet owners indicated they expect to draw grid power from the utility.

A new report from ISO New England Inc., the transmission organization that oversees New England's bulk electric power system and corresponding transmission lines, revealed that EV vehicle adoption over the next decade would significantly drive up electricity demand — demand satisfied mostly with natural gas, reported the VTDigger.

Vermont is hardly an exception. Princeton University recently projected that the U.S. will need 3,360% more electricity on hand to satisfy the Biden administration's EV goals, reported the Daily Mail.

"Right now, our infrastructure is likely 'OK' for the slow trickle of EV adoption," Robby DeGraff, the manager of product and consumer insights at AutoPacific, told the Mail. Increased demand shaped by government mandates will, however, mean that "the grid will certainly need to be revamped."

Already states like Georgia, Arizona, and California are buzzing their way toward capacity, and the costly infrastructure needed is far from established.

Michael Stadler, chief technology and marketing officer at Xendee, told Utility Drive that not only have numerous prospective EV charging station developers acknowledged they would be unable to acquire adequate electricity from utilities, electricity prices in some regions make it uneconomic to link up.

"Time of use rates and power charges are a really big problem," said Stadler. "If you end up paying more for electricity than gas, then something is wrong."

Many of Xendee's clients have apparently opted to install fossil-fuel-powered generators to power their charging stations. So in effect, there's a good chance that EVs whose drivers manage to find charging stations are powered by the same energy source EV is supposed to have made redundant — if not by a generator on-site, then by a predominantly gas-powered grid.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Biden’s Green Policies Will Leave People Freezing This Winter

Joe Biden and his EPA's push for electric heat pumps will be an even bigger fail than their push for electric vehicles.

Trump slams Biden's electric vehicle mandate, vowing to eliminate it on day one



Former President Donald Trump skipped the second Republican presidential debate Wednesday, instead making a familiar populist appeal to a crowd of autoworkers in Clinton Township, Michigan. In his remarks — which the Biden campaign deemed "incoherent" despite the worrying standard set by their 80-year-old candidate — Trump condemned the Democratic president's electric vehicle mandates, vowing to eliminate them on day one.

Trump, who leads those Republicans he elected not to debate Wednesday by at least 39 points in the latest Economist/YouGov poll, doubled down on the economic nationalism that helped secure him the White House in 2016, telling autoworkers at Drake Enterprises, a non-unionized automotive parts manufacturer in Macomb County, that the Biden administration was perpetrating a "government assassination" of the American auto industry.

"Joe Biden claims to be the most pro-union president in history," said Trump, referring to the octogenarian Democrat who ratified legislation blocking a U.S. railroad strike last year. "His entire career has been an act of economic treason and union destruction."

"To the striking workers, I support you and your goal of fair wages and greater stability, and I truly hope you get a fair deal for yourselves and your families," said Trump. "But if your union leaders will not demand that crooked Joe repeal his electric vehicle mandate immediately, then it doesn't matter what hourly wage you get."

President Joe Biden, who spoke to striking United Auto Workers members on a picket line nearby a day earlier, has set a target to have 50% of all new vehicle sales be electric by 2030. The Biden administration's update to emission limits for cars means that by 2032, EVs will have to make up two-thirds of all new cars sold.

Besides the commonly discussed disruptions that adoption of electric vehicles poses, such as the incredible strain they will likely place on the electric grid, Yen Chen, principal economist at the Center for Automotive Research, told WBUR-FM that they will be job-killers, at least in Michigan.

"Traditional internal combustion engines, vehicles. You need two major components. That's engine and transmission. Of course, along with the engine and transmission, you have a fuel system and exhaust system that go with it," said Chen. "Those [do not] not exist in the EV. EV has none of them. And in terms of the union and employment, making engine and transmission require a significant amount of the labor to put it together."

Ernst & Young estimated that vehicles with conventional power trains have as many as 2,000 components in their power trains. Tesla's drive train, by way of comparison, reportedly contains only 17 moving parts.

In addition to containing fewer parts, EVs rely on construction techniques that are often more automated, meaning not nearly as many workers will be needed, according to Chen.

Ford and other industry experts prophesied in 2019 that an estimated 30% less labor will be required to build electric cars, reported CNN.

City Journal recently suggested that "the total EV ecosystem involves more labor per vehicle, though most of the increase is found in the manufacturing chain," meaning that while jobs may be lost in America, many will likely be created overseas.

The Financial Times indicated that just as there might be fewer American auto worker jobs, there will also be fewer union jobs in the EV ecosystem.

Trump suggested in his speech Wednesday that a wage bump won't "make a damn bit of difference because in two to three years, [auto workers] will not have one job in this state."

"[Biden is] selling you out to China. He's selling you out to the environmental extremists. All the radical left people have no idea how bad this going to be also for the environment," said Trump. "You can be loyal to American labor or you can be loyal to the environmental lunatics, but you can't really be loyal to both. ... Crooked Joe is siding with the left-wing crazies who will destroy automobile manufacturing and will destroy our country itself."

Trump, who made a show of threatening to eliminate tax credits for EVs while in office, vowed to the crowd in Michigan, "On Day One, I will terminate Joe Biden's electric vehicle mandate and I will cancel every job-killing regulation that is crushing American autoworkers."

The former president vowed also to "unleash a thing called American energy" and "stop the ban on the internal combustion engine."

Axios reported that Trump-voting states are less likely to embrace EVs.

Trump speaks to auto workers in Michiganyoutu.be

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

British agency criticized after telling millions of citizens not to heat their homes at night to reduce emissions



British bureaucrats, much like those in the United States and other Western countries, appear keen on further compromising citizens' quality of life in hopes of arresting ever-changing weather patterns, which some alarmists continue to fearfully and dogmatically refer to as "climate change."

While many so-called "green" initiatives aimed at sweeping the proverbial waves back into the sea have gone relatively unchallenged in recent years, the U.K. appears to have gone too far with one of its agency's latest recommendations.

The U.K.'s Climate Change Committee, an independent statutory body established under the 2008 Climate Change Act and tasked with hectoring the nation over emissions targets, has urged millions of families not to heat their homes at night, reported the Telegraph.

In its "Sixth Carbon Budget" paper advising Parliament on the "volume of greenhouse gases the UK can emit during the period 2033-2037," the CCC, which sets legally binding limits, implored households with electric-powered heating systems, including heat pumps, to shut off their radiators in the evening.

"There is significant potential to deliver emissions savings, just by changing the way we use our homes," said the report. "It is possible to pre-heat ahead of peak times. This enables access to cheaper tariffs which reflect the reduced costs associated with producing power off-peak and reducing requirements for network reinforcement to manage peak loads."

The Telegraph reported that the CCC has further insisted that, as of 2033, all newly built homes should be constructed to accommodate pre-heating.

A spokesman for the CCC stressed that "[s]mart heating of homes like this also makes the best possible use of the grid and supports greater use of cheap renewable generation."

What to some might come off as coercive social engineering, the CCC simply calls "behaviour change."

Similar proposals, which in practice look like wartime rationing, have been advanced and executed in Gov. Gavin Newsom's California. However, in the case of California, the Independent System Operator had to call upon consumers to ration power because the state's shift to renewable energy has left it with an unstable power grid and sporadic blackouts.

While advertised as a way to save households money, the proposal that Britons "pre-heat" their homes earlier in the day then watch their breaths at night has been met with significant criticism, not the least because Chris Stark, the agency's climate czar, uses a gas boiler, meaning he might get to enjoy the warmth the CCC otherwise seeks to deny his countrymen.

Homes with gas heating appear to be exempt from the CCC's recommendation, but the U.K. has plans to ban those alternatives in the coming years — meaning everyone, including Stark, might soon feel the evening chill.

Andrew Montford, the director of Net Zero Watch — a group that monitors the government's extremist climate polices — told the Telegraph, "The grid is already creaking, and daft ideas like this show just how much worse it will become. ... It's clear that renewables are a disaster in the making. We now need political leaders with the courage to admit it."

British lawmaker Craig Mackinlay, the chair of the parliamentary Net Zero Scrutiny Group, said, "This latest advice to freeze ourselves on cold evenings merely shows the truth that the dream of plentiful and cheap renewable energy is a sham. ... I came into politics to improve all aspects of my constituents' lives, not make them colder and poorer."

The push to limit emissions and freeze out Westerners is predicated largely upon a sense that the world is confronted with an climate "emergency."

Despite the repeated suggestion that the science is settled, an international coalition of thousands of scientists, including a handful of Nobel laureates, just penned a declaration stressing, "There is no climate emergency."

Dr. John F. Clauser, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, and Dr. Ivar Giaever, a Norwegian-American engineer who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973, have joined over 1,600 other scientists and professionals in stressing the following points:

  • "Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming";
  • "Warming is far slower than predicted";
  • "Climate policy relies on inadequate models";
  • "CO2 is not a pollutant. It is essential to all life on Earth. ... More CO2 is beneficial for nature, greening the earth";
  • "Global warming has not increased natural disasters"; and
  • "Climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities."

The declaration further states that "[c]limate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. In particular, scientists should emphasize that their modeling output is not the result of magic: computer models are human-made. What comes out is fully dependent on what theoreticians and programmers have put in: hypotheses, assumptions, relationships, parameterizations, stability constraints, etc. Unfortunately, in mainstream climate science most of this input is undeclared."

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!