It’s not a great analogy, though, because it does and always will cost money to use vehicles on roadways, that’s not ever going away.
I have a hard time equating using a road for an optional road trip to wasting water.
ETA: and what @DukeTrout said. Thank you. That’s the part that was giving me pause.
Unless you’re proposing providing free electricity for everyone to charge their vehicles we’ve already got a use-based model and will have one for privately owned vehicles for the foreseeable future. Is charging for greater road use more inequitable than charging for greater power use?
FFS, please read what I wrote. Charge people for the electricity they use. Fund electricity infrastructure development with general taxes.
A person who drives a huge SUV puts a lot more wear and tear on the road than someone who drives a compact car. The cost of infrastructure maintenance depends to how that infrastructure is used.
Part of my trouble with this is also that, where I live, personal vehicles are the very least of our road wear worries. Even if nobody uses a road, it gets potholes and stuff because of the winters. And the snow plows need to keep them all cleared for emergency vehicles, so 
I’ve often thought how inequitable the whole costs of road maintenance fall across the country as a whole.
But tying it back to the electrical grid thing. To apply the model you’re talking about, it can’t rely just on charging for usage, because people who decide to live farther away from power sources, requiring a longer power line run, should have to pay for the additional infrastructure that is needed only because they want to live in the boonies.
It would be a good way to incentivize denser settlements, but it would be very tricky to do it in a fair way.
vat taxes and increased license fees for large vehicles seems reasonable. there’s no reason we have to make it “fair” to the hummer owner who drives only twice a year. they bought the car, they can pay
give discounts for ev, charge more for combustion. all is well
Providing incentives to modulate behavior isn’t just about “fairness” though. In your proposal, where fees are completely decoupled from road usage, the Hummer owner who drives his 9000 lb behemoth tens of thousands of miles a year doesn’t pay a penny more towards road maintenance than the one who leaves his hummer in the driveway. Yes, maybe fewer people would choose to buy hummers but those that did would have no incentive not to drive the hell out of them.
I don’t understand where you’re coming from. Are you assuming vehicle fuel (whether electricity or other) is suddenly free and vehicle maintenance costs nothing?
The cost of infrastructure maintenance need not always be a 1-to-1 relationship with the users but any time that the end users aren’t bearing the full cost of the resources they use it amounts to a government subsidy.
That is not in itself a bad thing; lots of things should be subsidized. But whenever we provide financial incentives for specific kinds of behaviors then we should consider whether those are activities we ought to be incentivizing.
For example, you rarely see people driving big honkin’ SUVs in European cities because the combination of government subsidies and public infrastructure in those places makes it expensive and impractical for most commuters to drive a private vehicle that uses a lot of fuel and is difficult to park. But if you live somewhere where commuter rail is nowhere to be found, bike lanes are rare, the cost of gasoline is subsidized and there are lots of big shiny highways to drive on then you might decide a large privately owned automobile is the best way to go.
I have basically the same thing - my car isn’t a Tesla - but I do have a couple of Tesla power wall batteries. When it’s nice out I use <1% grid power each day even in the summer when running AC sometimes.
We woud invest in a couple of Power Wall batteries right now, save that our local electric company is negatively incentivizing it. Before rooftop solar became a Thing locally, you could get a good deal from the electric company for your excess power; they would buy it from you at the going rate, and you could buy it back for the going rate later, if you needed it. Then the electric company downgraded the deals when solar became popular, to the point where if you had excess power fed back into the grid, you got no credit for it (we were grandfathered in on getting credit). If you change the grandfathered system, you automatically are put into the current deal where you get no credit for excess generated power. This is because if everyone produces their own power, the electric company has no spare money to maintain and upgrade the grid (they say), and balancing power demands is tricky.
Good example of what I was talking about upthread; the traditional funding model pays for the cost of the grid by taking a percentage of everyone’s electric bills. But a household that is a net producer of energy pays nothing under this model even though they depend on a functional grid just as much as everyone else (for putting energy into the system during surplus periods and taking it back during peak usage periods). The traditional funding model doesn’t work well in a system of distributed energy production.
But why are we assuming that personal transportation will be done by electric cars? There are still other options such as biofuels, hydrogen, and ammonia. It is too soon to tell which one will win out.
Many cities in the world, including all the ones in Canada where I have lived have flat rate water, in fact. It’s less common than it used to be and there is slightly more waste, to be sure, but it’s not as bad as you might think. This is a sidebar to your point though and I don’t wish to derail. Just thought I’d point out that flat rate water is actually pretty common and not as bananas as it sounds.
A lot more is a reach. Tractor trailers beat up the roads really badly, but the difference between a Civic and an Escalade is pretty negligible.
There’s a cost to trying to finely differentiate taxes too much. Pretty soon you get industries of tax lawyers arguing whether a pastrami sandwich heated in an in-store microwave and eaten on a bench belonging to a different business is taxable as groceries or restaurant food (true story from last week’s Planet Money podcast).
All luxury, point-of-use, and sales taxes suffer from this problem. To keep them from becoming regressive, they get obscenely complicated immediately. That’s why funding everything with progressive taxes on income would be the least complicated and fairest thing, but the jurisdictional problems of that are difficult to resolve given how large democracies are structured.
One of the things that makes energy storage difficult is that there are multiple cycles that you’re trying to store energy over- There’s the day-night cycle for solar, the weekly to monthly cycle for variations in wind power output, and the annual changes in both of those- these all need to be smoothed out and different technologies are better and worse at each of these. Batteries are really only good for the daily cycle at present, pumped storage fits intra-day to weekly fluctuations (where it’s available), but the big one is that longer-term storage issue. This is where I think we’ll see some sort of power to fuel solution come in - we already have a network that can store liquefied or compressed gas, and those gas power plants can be tweaked to run on hydrogen or a blend of gases. The major stumbling block is the efficiency of these processes (overbuilding renewables is the easy bit of this problem), so there’s a lot of work on more efficient electrolysis and similar methods.
The future is never certain but we need to make plans for it anyway. Given the current growth rate of electric car sales (12% of car sales and growing rapidly in CA) it’s only prudent to make infrastructure plans with large numbers of electric cars in mind. Over a quarter million were sold in CA last year, compared to less than 10,000 hydrogen vehicles.
Yes, but they don’t know how much of the power is consumed by say the house’s AC vs the EV.
I have a Bolt (small EV), but since I (mostly) work from home many days it goes 0 miles. Yesterday it went about 220 miles. Charging overnight it consumed a bit under $6 in electricity.
On the other hand this house has a lot of space, and the A/C consumes a ton of power. Maybe twice that per day (I guess that includes the electric dryer as well, I’m not sure I have any other significant power draws), realistically a bit under twice that per day.
Someone else might own the exact same car, and actually commute daily with it, and spend maybe $50 to $100 on electricity for the EV, and run less A/C (or more!).
The government doesn’t really know which one of us to bill for maybe 200 or 300 miles a month vs. 1000 miles a month.
I think they would need two electric meters, and to outlaw the use of “regular” electricity to charge EVs, or they would need to mandate all charging equipment to report back on usage, or mandate all cars report back on milage. They might be able to get some retrospective action on cars, telling manufacturers to update old software or face steep additional tax on new sales, or prohibition of new sales…but even then not all EV makers actually bothered to get the ability to do over the air software updates. GM for example needs to run it as a service campaign and have each owner come in for a visit.
(the two electric meters solution is something used in some countries…but they actually give you a discount on EV power usage, I guess they are still in the promoting EVs phase while we are starting to consider penalizing EVs)
I’m not sure how charging extra to charge EVs and using meter readings to do it will tie into home solar either (I know, or at least knew) one EV owner who was off grid (PG&E’s price to run power out to him was just too high, so he uses solar, and some wind, and some batteries, and has a backup generator to handle prolonged periods of not enough generation). Even ignoring off-grid it seems messy.
It is likely a lot easier to require something like yearly odometer readings for EVs much like many states have something like a periodic smog test for gas cars. You could make the payments monthly based on the last odometer reading, and throw in some miles with the initial purchase governmental fees. Better yet if you allowed people to opt into having the cars self report milage so they can avoid surprises and you make that a feature car makers then want to offer as opposed to something you force them to do.
Interesting, I have a Bolt and I had to tell it what the rate schedule was (which only took like half an hour because the UI is kind of lame, but I appreciate the feature even as I think it is a shame that is one of ht many many things the car’s phone app should do as they tend to have a better UI/UX there).
Wow, you must run way less air-conditioning at home then I do 
Hmmm, I see Nissan reporting 149 miles on a 40kW battery and 226 on a 62 kW battery. The Bolt depending on model year had a 238 to 259 mile range on a 60kW to 66kW battery.
I think, but couldn’t confirm that the 90 mile Leaf range was a discontinued smaller battery.
So I think the Leaf and Bolt are fairly similar in range per kW, the Leaf just had a greater variation in battery sizes.
Yeah. Plus there are a ton of really nice things about EVs that aren’t “ok if we all had EVs the world would be nicer”. I freely admit EVs also have some things that are not so awesome, and the two don’t balance out the same way for everyone (i.e. two perfectly rational people in perfect possession of all the needed information can make very different choices about weather an EV is good for them personally and both can be correct). I personally love mine though. Even if the seats blow goats.
I’m not so sure.
Airconditioners went from luxuries that only public buildings and rich people had to something most people can afford in around 20 years (under that I think).
It takes about 20 years to replace the rolling stock (and even then there are a few stragglers out there with cars older then 20 years).
I also am not really sure I believe the assertion that an EV is twice as bad as hime air conn, since the real issue from utilities point of view is peak demand, and they can do a lot of things to smooth peak EV demand (it is already pretty easy to push a lot of it to off peak usage). It is much much harder to convince home owners to not run air con during peak power usage times (because those are the peak hot times, because A/C is most of the peak demand).
Public transport might be a better solution then getting everyone to buy EVs and smear demand across the late evening/deep night, but I would bet it is easier to get the average American to want an EV then to want a bus pass. Also easier to get them to use a magical charging box that leaves up to two cars fully charged overnight at a lower price even if it charges them slower…so long as it still gets it done then to convince them that riding a bus is nice.
The government currently collects odometer readings when cars are sold. I think they also do so when cars are smog checked. Smog check is two years in many states (but most skip the first 3 to 5 years after manufacture), and I vaguely recall old enough cars need to be smoked yearly in MD, or maybe just if they were marginal as passing.
You could likely do something in that ballpark for EVs with optional more frequent self reporting for a discount (even if small).
What if my sole debate point is “right on!”?
yeah, good point. there’s a cost to administrating, collecting, and enforcing taxes - simple is good. not, for instance, a flat income tax but a simple progressive curve
that’s the same argument people use against any shared burden, including healthcare or welfare. and it just rings hollow to me. why should i be against subsides if they benefit society?
sure, you want to nudge people to turn their water and lights off - but the use and cost are so separated that it’s really hard to tell how much doing something like an extra load of laundry costs. driving and mile taxes? even more so
granted i’m financially stable and i barely look at my utility bills but i conserve as best as i can because i want to be a responsible adult. i’m not too worried about some few grifters on welfare or snap. nor am i particularly worried - separate from co2 and safety concerns - about an suv owner driving around the block all night long to stick it to the man
if we got things sort of close enough right, that’s more than good enough for me
Pge (as other have written), is a criminal enterprise. We lived for a while in a house powered by SMUD and always heard about how bad pge was/is. We didn’t believe it.
When we moved to the foothills we were thrust into the maw of pge. Our first 3 days, we spent $300 in power from pge. It was 110+ out and the movers kept leaving the doors open. We vowed to get solar after that point.
When we “got” solar, we found out how criminal pge is. Normal power companies ask for your plans for solar and then either okay it or come back with amendments. Pge waits until the whole system is built and then looks at your plans. Pge then took 12 weeks to look at our plans. After the 12 weeks they then told us that the transformer was underpowered and that it would take 6 months to plan for a new transformer and up to 9 months for install. Meanwhile we’re forced to pay $500/month in power and almost as much to pay for the panels per month.
Once we had the timeframe for the transformer install, pge canceled the install twice before it finally went up (they only offer 1 day per month for installs). Once the transformer went up we waited another 2 weeks before they turned on the system. During this ordeal, pge was lobying to change the NEM rules to (further) benefit pge. We now generate more power than we consume and are thankfully grandfathered in to NEM 2.0
Because we’re in pge territory, we have tons of scheduled and unscheduled blackouts. The sad part is, despite our array providing so much power, we cannot run solely off of solar in the event of a power outage. Batteries that will support our system are about $45k and are 18+ months out for tesla or in-the-pipeline through sunpower. If being self-sufficient during an outage is our only aim, we’d be better off with a 10k generac
Power companies do not want us going solar. EVs are almost untenable because companies like pge do not want to spend the $ to upgrade their infrastructure. Even when they “pay” or are held “accountable” for their actions they just pass it along to us suckers
I had a point here, I think, but I just ended up pissed off (again)
