Policies enacted by the Biden administration and the previous, Democrat-controlled Congress are set to plunge the USA into a serious energy crisis in the coming years. It all has to do with the Biden government’s decision to try to force mass adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) before either the market or the power grid can adjust to meet the whopping new demand for power generation or to supply the critical minerals needed to make the batteries that power the cars.
Democrat members of Congress and Biden’s appointed officials are coordinating an effort to force EV adoption on reluctant consumers via a classic carrot and stick approach. The Orwellian 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provides the carrot in the form of billions of dollars in new subsidies for EV makers and buyers alike, while the Biden EPA applies the proverbial stick by invoking stricter tailpipe emissions controls and higher mileage requirements designed to force most current internal combustion engine (ICE) models out of the market.
The desired result, according to the White House, will be that two thirds of cars on the road by 2032 will be EVs. Given that Hedges & Co reports there were 290 million cars on US roads in 2022, and accounting for likely growth over the next decade, this would mean well over 200 million EVs on US roads in just 9 years. That compares to roughly 3 million EVs currently, so we’re talking about a 70-fold rise in EV adoption in that short period of time.
No problem, right?
Wrong. There are plenty of problems with this concept – very large and imposing problems, in fact.
Start with the massive additional load the recharging of that many additional EVs would put onto the nation’s regional power grids. Elon Musk himself said in 2021 that accommodating such a rapid adoption of EVs would require a doubling of US generation capacity. That’s in just 9 years on a grid system that has taken well over a century to build so far.
Second, even the Biden administration itself admitted in May that such an expansion of the grid will require at least 47,000 miles of new high-voltage transmission capacity. This is a mind-boggling number for several reasons, one of the most pressing of which is how long it takes just to get the permits to build new transmission in the US. As an example, the Biden government finally, at long last, issued the final permits for the TransWest transmission project in June. What is most notable about that is the fact that it took 18 years for this single, 732-mile high-voltage transmission project, designed to carry electricity generated by Wyoming wind farms to the West Coast, to obtain all the needed permits to finally begin construction, which itself will take several more years to complete.
So, 18 years to permit a single 732-mile project, yet the Biden administration’s own numbers indicate a need for the equivalent of 60 more TransWest projects in just 9 years. This new math doesn’t really seem to work.
But that’s not the only roadblock looming here. Perhaps even more pressing than the daunting permitting challenges is the fact that the US power sector is currently experiencing a severe shortage of power transformers, integral to any new transmission project. The shortage of high-voltage transformers is especially acute, with the industry reporting lead times of as much as four years to acquire new ones. Few of these transformers are made domestically, with most having to be sourced overseas via supply chains often controlled by China.
This problem is growing increasingly severe over time, and amazingly, the Department of Energy is threatening to make matters even worse by moving to finalize stricter efficiency standards on a category of critical equipment that already performs at 97 per cent efficiency. Amazing.
Supply shortages of critical energy minerals integral to the manufacture of the batteries that power EVs also threaten to become a roadblock. A new report from S&P Global finds that IRA subsidies for EVs are likely to make an already existing problem even worse in the coming years by causing EV adoption to expand more rapidly than the mining industry can ramp up supplies for minerals like lithium, nickel, copper, and cobalt. “Spurred by the IRA, energy-transition-related US demand for the critical minerals lithium, nickel and cobalt, taken together, will be 23 times higher in 2035 than it was in 2021. For copper, it will be twice as high,” the report says.
Taking all these simultaneously occurring factors into consideration, the looming trainwreck ahead becomes clear. Unless the direction US federal energy policy shifts soon, Americans appear destined to face an entirely government-manufactured energy crisis in the coming years, probably sooner than anyone currently expects.
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August 23, 2023 at 08:34PM
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Biden's crazy electric car plan means grid collapse, probably this decade - The Telegraph
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