According to R. James Woolsey, former director of the CIA and now a champion of energy independence, advanced battery technologies, plug-ins and hybrid cars represent the future of energy and transportation in the United States. If he’s right, the impact on our transportation and energy economies will be profound.
In an op-ed (subscribers only) in the Wall Street Journal today, here’s what he says:
The change is being driven by innovations in the batteries that now power modern electronics. If hybrid gasoline-electric cars are provided with advanced batteries having improved energy and power density — variants of the ones in our computers and cell phones — dozens of vehicle prototypes are now demonstrating that these “plug-in hybrids” can more than double hybrids’ overall (gasoline) mileage. With a plug-in, charging your car overnight from an ordinary 110-volt socket in your garage lets you drive 20 miles or more on the electricity stored in the topped-up battery before the car lapses into its normal hybrid mode. …
During those 20 all-electric miles you will be driving at a cost of between a penny and three cents a mile instead of the current 10-cent-a-mile cost of gasoline.
Not only would the economics of personal mobility be transformed, so would the electric power industry. Writes Woolsey:
Utilities are rapidly becoming quite interested inplug-ins because of the substantial benefit to them of being able to sell off-peak power at night. … Adopting plug-ins will not create a need for new base load electricity generation plants until plug-ins constitute over 84% of the country’s 220 million passenger vehicles. Further, those plug-ins that are left connected to an electrical socket after being fully charged (most U.S. cars are parked over 20 hours a day) can substitute for expensive natural gas by providing electricity from their batteries back to the grid: “spinning” reserves to help deal with power outages and regulation of the grid’s voltage and amperage.
Powering cars with electricity instead of gas has a number of advantages. It creates local economic activity for American utilities and fuel suppliers (whether coal, nuclear or green energy) in place of oil imported from overseas. Additionally, Woolsey notes, “there would be a national average reduction in carbon emissions by about 60% per vehicle when a plug-in hybrid with a 20-mile all-electric range replaces a conventional car.”
Virginia needs to prepare for the electric-hybrid future now. A couple of obvious questions:
- What changes should we make to our electric regulatory apparatus to encourage and enable electric plug-ins?
- If Woolsey’s scenario transpires, the gasoline tax is toast. What funding mechanisms should Virginia adopt in its place to build and maintain its roads?
We can see the future coming. We can either let it crash upon us, or we can embrace it to create a stronger, cleaner more vibrant Commonwealth.
