Daily on Energy: The importance of the electric Ford-150 for Biden’s plans

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WILL ELECTRIC PICKUP TRUCKS SELL? President Joe Biden’s hopes for a green auto market depend on it. He is traveling tomorrow to a Detroit factory that will manufacture the electric Ford-150, which the carmaker will officially introduce on Wednesday night. His visit comes as EVs still represent only 2% of auto sales. But could electric pickups be the accelerant the market needs?

A whopping 2.9 million pickups were sold in the U.S. last year, making up roughly 20% of the entire auto market, according to Cox Automotive.

Several vehicle makers will introduce EV pickup trucks in the coming years, but Ford’s rollout is especially important because its F-series trucks, including the F-150, have been the best-selling vehicle in the U.S. for 39 straight years.

Michelle Krebs, executive analyst Cox Automotive, told us that Biden’s role is not necessarily to convince people to buy EV pickup trucks.

“That is up to the manufacturers,” Krebs said.

She noted that drivers of pickups have specific expectations that automakers have to prove EV versions can match, such as towing and carrying loads, traversing rugged terrain, and requiring minimal downtime for repairs and maintenance.

Biden’s role: He can pave the way for EV adoption by making them more attractive to buyers. During his visit to Ford, he’ll likely plug his $2.3 trillion infrastructure and clean energy plan that seeks to reduce the cost of EVs through subsidies and rebates, while providing grants to states and localities to build 500,000 charging stations, and incentives for manufacturers to retool factories to make batteries and EVs. In total, Biden’s plan would spend at least $174 billion on vehicle electrification.

All of these would address the obstacles EVs face, including upfront price, to which lower battery costs are key, along with range anxiety.

What we don’t know: Krebs said there are a lot of unknowns about the EV pickup market specifically, including whether one exists at all and how big it might be.

“Are these traditional truck buyers or are these people who haven’t purchased a truck before but are interested now that electric is an option? Who will these buyers purchase from – a traditional truck maker, like Ford, with decades of expertise in truck making, or an upstart like Tesla, Rivian, etc.?” she said.

Cox released a survey in January that sought to address those questions, finding that nearly 2-in-5 consumers in the market for a pickup truck in the next two years are considering an electric version.

Three-quarters of those considering buying an electric pickup are likely to consider the Ford F-150, the best performing of any type.

What about the gas shortages? Last week, we saw just how much people in the U.S. still rely on their gas-powered vehicles — so much so that they were pushing up gas prices and demand in a race to fill up after the Colonial Pipeline hack.

Electric vehicle advocates, however, argue the gas shortages show consumers the risks in depending on gas-powered cars, as their fuel is tied to a more volatile market.

“It’s headlines like we saw last week that make the urgency for EVs abundantly clear,” said Dan Zotos, communications director for the Zero Emissions Transportation Association, a coalition of electric vehicle companies, utilities, and others pushing for all-electric vehicle sales by 2030.

Electric cars are “more reliable, cheaper to charge/mile, and are a necessary shift from an overreliance on fossil fuels,” Zotos told us, adding that the gas shortages show the U.S. must move quickly to advance charging infrastructure investments and consumer purchase incentives.

Welcome to Daily on Energy, written by Washington Examiner Energy and Environment Writers Josh Siegel (@SiegelScribe) and Abby Smith (@AbbySmithDC). Email [email protected] or [email protected] for tips, suggestions, calendar items, and anything else. If a friend sent this to you and you’d like to sign up, click here. If signing up doesn’t work, shoot us an email, and we’ll add you to our list.

CLEAN ENERGY SHIFT PRESENTS CYBERSECURITY RISKS TOO: The shift to cleaner energy forebodes greater cybersecurity challenges, Josh reports for a story posted this morning.

The cyberattack that forced the shutdown of the Colonial Pipeline exposed vulnerabilities of existing oil and gas infrastructure. But there are also risks of transitioning from a bulk fossil-fuel dependent system to one that’s decentralized with additional points of contact.

Manny Cancel of the North American Electric Reliability Council warned of the risks in an expansion of connected devices and digitized technologies, such as smart thermostats and rooftop solar panels.

“Going to a more green and distributed energy future is a tremendous opportunity with lots of benefits,” said Cancel, who is senior vice president and chief executive officer of NERC’s Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center. “It shouldn’t be at the expense to security because, essentially, you are expanding the vector, the number of entry points and targets for adversaries to exploit.

Potential advantages: Administration officials said last week they are interested in requiring recipients of grants authorized by infrastructure legislation to implement cybersecurity protections as they build wind and solar farms, electric transmission lines, and electric vehicle charging stations.

More transmission lines can allow regions during emergency events to pull in power from unaffected places. Adding diversity to the grid through cleaner fuels is good for resiliency. Distributed sources that can generate clean power on-site can provide backup during an outage.

“In the perfect world, you could isolate and contain a portion of the problem and not shut everything down,” said Leo Simonovich, head of industrial cybersecurity at Siemens Energy.

SO MUCH FOR USER FEES: The White House is not interested in introducing user fees to pay for its infrastructure and clean energy spending plans.

User fees, including increasing the federal gas tax or rolling out a new vehicle miles traveled fee on electric vehicles, would “violate” Biden’s promise not to hike levies on people earning less than $400,000 a year, according to White House press secretary Jen Psaki.

“The president’s pledge and his commitment, his line in the sand, his red line, whatever you want to call it, is that he will not raise taxes for people making less than $400,000, a year, user fees that have been proposed out there would violate that,” Psaki told reporters Friday.

Some Senate Democrats are inching towards Republicans’ preference for user fees as pay-fors, Axios reported last week, but that idea won’t get traction without White House support.

INSLEE VETOES GAS-POWERED CAR BAN: Washington Gov. Jay Inslee rejected legislation last week that would have barred the sales of new gas-powered cars in the state by 2030, a goal five years earlier than California’s.

Inslee didn’t take issue with the gas-powered car sales ban itself or the 2030 deadline, but instead criticized that the policy was connected to implementing a road usage fee that would charge people for the miles they drive on the state’s roads. Such a fee has been proposed as a way to make electric vehicle owners pay for infrastructure because they aren’t subject to gas taxes.

The Washington state legislation would have required 75% of the cars on the state’s roads to be covered by such a usage fee before the gas-powered car sales ban took effect.

“Transportation is our state’s greatest source of carbon emissions and we cannot afford to link an important goal like getting to 100% zero-emission vehicles to a separate policy that will take time to design and implement,” Inslee said in a statement explaining his veto.

Inslee added he is “committed to getting to zero emission transportation as quickly as possible,” and is also “open to exploring the potential of a road usage charge program as part of a larger transportation revenue discussion.”

KERRY INNOVATION FRACAS MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING? Climate envoy John Kerry is drawing criticism from climate activists for saying over the weekend that half of the emissions cuts the world needs to reach net-zero will come from technologies that haven’t been invented yet.

“The danger is less from outright climate denial and more from climate advocates sharing denialist beliefs,” tweeted Genevieve Guenther, founder and director of End Climate Science.

Guenther and other climate activists equated Kerry’s comments to denying the viability of mature technologies.

“I’m told by scientists that 50% of the reductions we have to make (to get to near zero emissions) by 2050 or 2045 are going to come from technologies we don’t yet have,” Kerry told BBC.

This framing isn’t new: What’s confusing to us about the uproar is Kerry and the White House have made similar statements before.

A White House readout summarizing Biden’s climate summit last declared an “urgent” need for innovation because “45% of the emissions reductions needed for a swift net-zero transition must come from technologies that are not commercially available,” a projection the administration attributed to Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency.

“IEA analysis shows that about half the reductions to get to net zero emissions in 2050 will need to come from technologies that are not yet ready for market,” Birol said during remarks at the summit.

Jason Bordoff, director of Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy, noted that perhaps Kerry could have been more precise with his words to say a lot more work needs to be done to commercialize key technologies, such as direct air capture, that have been invented but not deployed.

OIL COMPANIES NOTCH A LEGAL WIN: BP, ExxonMobil, and other oil giants will get another opportunity to push city and state lawsuits seeking to force them to pay for climate damages to federal court after a Supreme Court ruling in their favor this morning.

The Supreme Court’s opinion will have implications for the more than two dozen climate liability lawsuits oil companies now face from cities and states.

The oil industry has been attempting to move those lawsuits to federal court, which they see as a more favorable venue. Several federal appeals courts have rejected the industry’s claims, and the Supreme Court was considering the oil industry’s appeal in Baltimore’s case.

The Supreme Court’s ruling didn’t go as far as the oil companies and their industry allies were hoping, however. The court didn’t address the merits of Baltimore’s claims against the oil companies, nor make any decision about whether the case should be held in federal or state court.

TESLA DITCHES BITCOIN FOR NOW AMID EMISSIONS CONCERNS: Tesla won’t allow people to buy its cars using Bitcoin, CEO Elon Musk said this week, citing the cryptocurrency’s high fossil fuel use.

“We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel,” Musk said via Twitter on Wednesday. “Cryptocurrency is a good idea on many levels and we believe it has a promising future, but this cannot come at great cost to the environment.”

The announcement is a 180-degree flip for Tesla, which invested $1.5 billion in Bitcoin earlier this year and began allowing people to buy its electric cars using the cryptocurrency in March.

Energy analysts have been cautioning that the cryptocurrency is “energy-hungry” for years. More in Abby’s story posted over the weekend.

MOVERS AND SHAKERS: The conservative clean energy group C3 Solutions has hired Nick Loris as vice president of public policy. Loris, an economist, studied energy and environment policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

The Rundown

Wall Street Journal Natural gas, America’s No. 1 power source, already has a new challenger: batteries

Reuters BP’s lobbying for gas shows rifts over path to net-zero emissions

Politico Newsom’s looming threat: summer blackouts

Washington Post EPA orders Virgin Islands refinery to shut down, citing ‘imminent’ health threat

Calendar

TUESDAY | MAY 18

10 a.m. 366 Dirksen. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will hold a hearing to consider the nominations of Robert Anderson to be solicitor of the Interior Department, Shannon Estenoz to be assistant secretary for fish and wildlife and parks, and Tanya Trujillo to be an assistant secretary of the Interior (Water and Science).

WEDNESDAY | MAY 19

10 a.m. G-50 Dirsken. The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will hold a hearing titled, “Examining Biodiversity Loss: Drivers, Impacts, and Potential Solutions.”

10:30 a.m. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm will testify remotely before the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Energy on the agency’s fiscal year 2022 budget request.

2 p.m. Green 2.0 will host a virtual discussion with Asian-American and Pacific Islander leaders on the future of the environmental movement.

THURSDAY | MAY 20

9:30 a.m. The House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis will hold a remote hearing titled, “Powering Up Clean Energy: Investments to Modernize and Expand the Electric Grid.”

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