Energy experts have raised concerns about electric vehicles becoming widely adopted in the U.S. due to issues like cost and affordability, range limitations, lack of charging infrastructure, reliability questions, and impacts to the electric grid and energy costs.
While government policies heavily subsidize EVs, critics argue this amounts to a regressive wealth transfer, with lower/middle income Americans shouldering the higher costs.
Some people are “just so hellbent on making sure that this transition happens, even if that means wrecking the economy, in terms of electricity, its reliability, the grid, getting brownouts or blackouts or economic wreckage by people who otherwise can’t afford these new vehicles,” former CIA operations officer Bryan Dean Wright said.
The shift to EVs risks economic wreckage if infrastructure can’t support increased electricity demands.
While EVs may work for some commuters, many argue they are impractical for most Americans given these challenges.
“That cost is being shouldered by buyers and car companies by raising the price of gas-powered vehicles, [which] is basically just a direct wealth transfer, just paying for EV subsidies and that will grow over time, if we continue to keep this regime in place,” Life:Powered policy director Brent Bennett stated.
“Some of those expenses are going to come down because you’re going to find manufacturing efficiencies and you’re going to be able to lower the cost of that product,” Wright said. “But as of this moment, with all the push, it is a wealth transfer from people who have their current gas vehicles to an EV. I don’t know if that’s going to be the case in 10 or 20 years, but what we see in California is because of some of these dirty green policies.”
“We calculated that if you add on the socialized infrastructure costs, and then in particular add on California’s zero emission vehicle mandate, which adds cost to all of us because the automakers have to pay to produce more EVs in California, and they spread that cost to the whole country, the federal fuel economy regulations alone are subsidizing each EV by about $20,000. Add all this together, and each EV is getting almost $50,000 in subsidies,” Bennett said.
“The burden of this revolution is it is fundamentally a tax on the working class and on the middle class … a lot of folks struggling in those two worlds and it really is unfair to a lot of the working folks in this country,” Wright said.
“At some point we’re going to face this issue of, we don’t have the charging infrastructure, we don’t have enough electricity overnight, we’re going to have to adjust unless we want to crash the global economy,” he said.
“You’re plugging it in, but you’ve got an electricity bill, and the cost of that is really going to be dependent on where in the country you are,” Wright said. “You might have very cheap power with nuclear power or hydropower, or you can have very expensive power with solar and wind.”
“Now imagine, instead of over eight hours, you’re trying to charge in 30 minutes on a fast charger,” Bennett said. “Well, now you’re talking about that EV alone drawing as much power from the grid as a small grocery store. You put four of those together at a Tesla supercharging station, you’re talking as much power as a Walmart, so you have to upgrade your electrical infrastructure, your transmission and distribution infrastructure to support that.”
“Reducing emissions is a good thing, but our government is basically saying, ‘Well it’s all or nothing, it has to be zero emissions or the world ends, it has to be all EVs or nothing,'” he said. “That’s the problem is that we’re creating policy or at least all or nothing types of philosophies.”
“I hope the market corrects, I hope that some companies … stop the politicization of capital and actually get back closer to free markets,” Life:Powered senior fellow Jason Isaac said. “It would also be nice if they would support American energy producers because we produce it more responsibly than anywhere else on the planet.”
“I think you’re going to continue to see a movement back towards sanity where we just embrace American innovation [and] the technology that we have today that has made us world leaders in clean air,” he added.
However, EV proponents continue pushing for rapid adoption timelines some experts say are physically impossible given the slow pace of battery technology improvements.
There are concerns government policies are politicizing energy choices rather than allowing free market forces and American energy innovation to guide transportation solutions.
“Not only are we pushing for net-zero, but we’re doing it in a certain time frame that’s physically impossible to achieve,” Isaac said. “We’ll see batteries continue to improve, but at a very slow rate. Not only that, but it takes ten years to commercialize any battery technology and another ten years to really get it mature to where it has wide market penetration.”
“There will be improvements over time, but trying to say that we’re going to do this in the next ten years and trying to force it down our throats is absolutely one of the biggest energy policy blunders we’ve ever made,” he said. “Hopefully, reality is going to hit soon before we spend too much money, waste too much money on this.”
“Since the President took office, EV sales have more than quadrupled, with more than four and a half million EVs on the road. EV ownership is more affordable than ever before, with prices down over 20% from one year ago. The number of publicly available charging ports has also grown by over 70 percent, with 170,000 publicly available EV chargers across the country, putting us on track to deploy 500,000 chargers by 2026 – achieving the President’s goal four years early,” the White House stated.
