California’s Dumbest Idea Since the Bullet Train

by Andy Caldwell

 The relative footprints of the Escondida open pit mine vs a mechanical donkey magnified over 6,000x

The state and county’s Zero Emission Clean Vehicle (ZEV) plan is a clunker. The associated mandates will force us to purchase electric, hybrid, or hydrogen vehicles to ostensibly reduce transportation-related emissions. Obviously, nobody has done the math on what it will cost to replace California’s 31 million registered vehicles or the cost of generating and delivering the power to satisfy the gargantuan electricity demand it will create. 

For instance, one trucking company in Santa Maria has ceased doing business due in part to these mandates. ZEV would have cost the company $60 million to replace its fleet of 125 trucks, and that doesn’t count the price of the chargers or the cost to upgrade the power lines on site. Moreover, PG&E does not have the line capacity to deliver the additional electricity required for the upgrade.

The ZEV (Zero Emission Vehicle) program is the California bullet train on steroids.

These government initiatives are nothing more than a compilation of hype, virtue signaling, and wishful thinking, completely devoid of economic reality. Moreover, the county blew up the vertically integrated franchise model of our local utility companies when it joined a community energy partnership program (3CE) which serves as a parasite to the utility companies that serve our region.

In short, 3CE skims off ratepayer monies to create a slush fund for its own electricity generation via solar and wind, while expecting the utility companies and/or consumers to pay for additional transmission and distribution capacity (transmission lines can cost millions of dollars per mile).  

The Overwhelming Expense of Going All-Electric

PG&E and So Cal Edison (read: consumers and taxpayers), do not have the financial wherewithal, sans additional skyrocketing rates, to radically increase the thousands of miles of transmission lines required to handle a tripling of our current electricity generation. Neither does anyone have the financial wherewithal to increase the line capacity required for the distribution of electricity to and within homes and businesses for us to go all-electric. As the LA Times reports, one in five California households (and one in three low-income customers) are behind on their bills right now, owing an average of nearly $800.

The county’s draft plan compares the weight of coal, oil, and gas (fossil fuels) to that of rare earth materials such as cobalt and lithium (used in batteries) as if the weight of the materials indicates how green the source of energy is.

This is a complete farce.

First, it takes hundreds of pounds of cobalt and lithium to create a single one-thousand-pound EV battery. Yet that metric ignores the fact that producing 1,000 pounds of rare earth minerals requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of dirt and rock (via environmentally disastrous strip mining which also uses and contaminates vast amounts of water), according to Professor Mark Mills from Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. Moreover, coal is not used to create gasoline or diesel, it is used to create 20% of the electricity in the U.S.  Hence, the environmental impacts derived from coal are used in part to charge electric vehicles and appliances.

A $5-Trillion Charging Station Behemoth Required

Southern California has a grand total of one (count ‘em, one) large-scale charging station for big rigs that can charge up to 32 trucks at a time. However, the charging station gobbles up the electricity required to power a city of 200,000 people. We would need thousands of these charging stations to power all the trucks that come and go throughout our state, along with farm and construction equipment, not to mention the new electrification mandate for rail locomotives. Altogether, we would need the electrical generation, transmission, and distribution capacity to serve the equivalent of another 200 million people in our state.

The ZEV program is the CA bullet train on steroids.

The doomed-to-fail bullet train cost projection has ballooned to $128 billion, nearly four times the 2008 estimate and it is still not operational. The estimated cost for America to go all-electric?

$5 trillion!

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PS: To get a picture of the ecological devastation of the so-called green revolution, watch this video.

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