Yeah, the road funding issue really needs to be solved by taxing mileage or whatever. Some of these electric vehicles are massive and will put even more wear and tear on a road than gasoline powered cars. An F150 Lightning weighs 2000 lbs more than a base model gasoline F150. An electric Hummer weighs over 9000 lbs, more than 1000 lbs above the original military version. The heaviest of the old SUVs like a Chevy Suburban were rarely over 6000 lbs.
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The fairest solution would be some formula that multiplied vehicle weight by mileage, but then folks would be up in arms about Big Government spying on people through their odometers. It would also be a hard sell because people would get hit with a big additional tax bill every year/quarter/whatever instead of paying gradually (and usually without consciously thinking about it) every time they fill up their tanks.
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We have solar panels and a Tesla with approximately a 300 mile range when 90% charged. My gas powered car is essentially backup, driven to the grocery store and to the neighboring town perhaps once a week. DH plugs in the Tesla on the weekend, sucks up a full day of solar power, and is mostly recharged for the next week. The only thing that might make it even more effective would be a battery to store the excess power generated during the day, when neither of us are home.
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Actually, since most folks already have electric meters, couldn’t you tie electricity consumption to taxes for road use? Government already knows if you have an EV and what type it is, because of car registration. This also incentivizes solar generation, because you are probably at least partially fueling your car at home; I know of very few people who rely on only charging their EV at public stations.
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COMMUNIST!!! /s
Agreed - yet in the UK they privatised the supply/billing companies and the grid separately. We can buy our power from any number of supply companies. It is an entirely false market construction that is failing even now, because of its falsity and its poor regulation.
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In fact all EVs are already smart enough to do that. Many even have databases of local electric rates and can be set to automatically charge when rates are low. My Bolt did that. My Leaf could be told when I needed to leave in the morning and it would ensure the car was charged by then, while using the cheapest power it knew about over night. Worked great.
That said, my electric bill tripled when I got my first EV, so I don’t doubt the 40% increase number quoted.
That also said, I did the math on a gasoline car (assuming some average numbers for MPG and gas prices) and my transportation costs dropped by about 80%. That’s the efficiency of EVs that doesn’t get enough press. The Leaf, when fully charged (and doing the math for energy density of gasoline) has the equivalent of 3/4s of a gallon of gas in it. With which it could go 90 miles. The Bolt goes 250 miles on a similar amount. EVs are a goddamn efficiency miracle and I wish they got credit for this. It’s not just about “not burning gas”. It’s so much more than that.
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Many countries are going to have to rethink grid management as a result of net zero pledges. I’m not sure about the US but in the UK this is going to have to be some sort of a move to increased electrification and hydrogen. Dialling up the electricity alone would be such a challenge that it may well be impossible.
I would suggest that California is going to face some similar challenges. More renewable energy - and the end of big baseload like Diablo Canyon - is going to throw a lot of things up in the air.
Rooftop solar, domestic batteries, replacing natural gas with hydrogen? I suspect all this might have a role to play in California. Whether PG&E is capable of such dramatic change is a whole other bag of chips.
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What you need is a big old border wall. /s
I think it’s inevitable that we’re going to see more states and local governments focus on public transit to resolve these issues. It’s not like you can lay down more cable or power generators overnight. It takes years to build even without regulatory overhead. Especially with regard to the distribution portion of the grid (aka residential distribution). Thus the only real alternative is to make due with public transit to offset the load which should have been the primary means to reduce carbon footprint on top of many other actions (mixed use development, remote work mandates, etc).
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I suppose that could work too but you’d probably want to have some way to differentiate how much of your electricity was going to the car vs. the rest of your home so people who didn’t drive often wouldn’t get stuck with an unfair share of the road taxes.
It’s a tricky one for privacy advocates because any way I can think of to link road taxes to EV use would have to involve the government collecting more information on how people are using their vehicles.
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This is going to be a huge issue everywhere soon.
I’m pretty psyched about the infrastructure bill this administration passed, but, even though I know it’s overall a good direction, the focus on rapid electrification for buildings everywhere has me stressed out. So many states have aging power grids, and now we’re going to make heating and cooling homes reliant on those power grids? 
Especially for low income homes, having access to a diversity of power sources can be a life saver.
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In fact grid structure is the number one obstacle to decarbonization, which is something a great many eco-minded folks don’t understand. We have the technology, and it is cost effective, to go 100% solar and wind tomorrow. The problem is the grid collapses if we do that. To replace base load capacity (currently largely provided by coal and gas) we have to have huge amounts of grid storage. We have no viable large scale solutions for that. We have a few promising ideas and a few things that work well in specific situations (pumped hydro being the best right now) but we are nowhere close to solving this problem. In fact we are probably fifty years away from solving this problem.
The bridge to that is a word that most eco folks (especially here on BB) don’t want to hear. Nuclear. Nuclear power is by far our most rational way to get to a renewable future as quickly as possible. It’s that or we burn fossil fuels for another 50 years while we sort out grid storage which will make climate change so much worse than it needed to be. Sadly this is likely what will happen because of how irrationally afraid of nuclear people are.
Note: if people want to debate the merits of nuclear with me, we should probably do that elsewhere and not derail this thread.
Also note: I do not want to debate the merits of nuclear with you.
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Yahoo, My Peeps, cornering the market on news of cornering 30 years ahead.
Brainspore > That multiplied vehicle weight by mileage. …an extra tax bill all at once.
What, why wouldn’t moment-to-moment curb weight X distance X damage bonus be charged? That’s where to be if you want to affect behavior.
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That’s still inequitable because folks with lower income tend to have to commute farther from affordable housing to their workplace and are less likely to be able to work from home. Double that in places like California and Texas.
The equitable way to fund the Green New Deal is with wealth, corporate and income taxes.
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A lot more equitable than the current situation though, where rich Californians are driving Teslas and paying zero in fuel taxes. I like the idea of including vehicle weight in the equation. We need to incentivize smaller cars for commuting, which also tend to be cheaper.
And obviously we need to fund public transit so that everyone is less car-reliant.
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Sure but if you completely decouple the cost of road maintenance from the activities that put the most wear and tear on the roads or decouple the cost of power grid maintenance from the activities that put the most pressure on the power grid then you end up with externalized costs and perverse incentives.
If you choose to drive a 9000-pound SUV then you should pay a larger share of road maintenance costs than a person who chooses to drive a compact sedan or takes a bus to work.
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I don’t think the solution is to do something much worse for the most vulnerable in order to stick it to the least vulnerable. Just go straight to the equitable solution. Do not pass Go. Agreed about public transportation, but we still need to solve that last mile problem that remains a much bigger issue in the US than in other countries thanks to our road-centric infrastructure.
Once the critical infrastructure is in place, we can go back to a use-based model, but if we try to play catch-up with use-based funding, we will either fall orders of magnitude short of what we need or we will use-tax the poor and middle-class out of existence.
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I don’t know why it needs to be connected, though. We all benefit from having passable roads.
I don’t get to visit national parks but I have no problem with my taxes going to support them.
I don’t support all our wars, but I can’t decide I don’t want my taxes going to them.
It’s odd to me that roads are one of the only things people expect to be use-based instead of supported as part of the general commons.
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We all benefit from having drinkable water but imagine how much more waste we’d see if everyone paid the same amount for their water bill each month regardless of how much they actually used.
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My state has, on the surface, one of the most progressive tax structures. Where that falls apart on further examination is that if you do anything, there’s a use fee or tax. That’s regressive. If it’s worth doing for the public good, it’s worth funding from general tax revenues. It’s getting truly ridiculous that, in order to use public resources, one pays a use tax regardless of wealth or income. It makes it prohibitive for even lower middle class people to actually do things that are necessary for good health like hike, bike, paddle, go to the beach or float down a river.
You’re mixing your funding targets, though. If water infrastructure needs funding, fund that from general taxes because we all need it. That should be separate from charges for actual consumption.
As for roads, use-based funding for infrastructure development actually represents the perverse incentive. Folks who put little to no miles on their own vehicles still benefit from roads through delivery, maintenance, public works, etc vehicle mileage.
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