When President Joe Biden’s massive climate bill passed Congress in 2022, Republican Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina complained it was boondoggle.
The Inflation Reduction Act, which contained the largest climate investment in US history, would “throw money at woke climate and social programs that won’t work — including over $350 billion for ‘Green New Deal’ initiatives,” Hudson said in a statement after IRA’s passage.
But Hudson – now the head of House Republicans’ campaign committee – is one of the members of Congress whose district has benefitted the most from the climate law and its massive investment in clean energy.
About $12.7 billion in private investment has been announced in Hudson’s district since the bill passed, the second-highest amount in the nation. Much of it is from Toyota expanding a gargantuan car battery plant that has tripled in size since it was first announced. The factory will span the length of 756 football fields and will spur 5,100 new jobs, the company estimates.
Hudson isn’t alone. House Republicans uniformly voted against the IRA in August 2022 and have voted to repeal some of its biggest programs dozens of times, but their districts are disproportionately reaping its benefits.
The vast majority of the $346-billion-worth of announced investments – nearly 78% – has gone to Republican congressional districts, according to a CNN analysis of data from the nonpartisan Rhodium Group and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
I’m a huge fan of the idea of EVs for transportation. But I have a raised eyebrow here.
EV sales in Ontario come in around 7% per year now (roughly 100-120K). AutoForcast Solutions VP in charge of global vehicle forecasting Sam Fiorani says, “The industry, the buyers and the charging structure is just not ready for faster growth. It’s going to take five to 10 years to get there” (meaning to reach ICE parity in sales).
Here’s the list of battery plants just in Ontario (and one in Quebec). This investment represents many tens of billions of public dollars for this transition. Much cheering.
So my question is batteries for what? The US – as you’ve shown here – is also massively investing in battery production, presumably for the same EV market south of the border Ontario manufacturers presume will be available to supply. Yet EV sales and infrastructure investment does not seem to me to align anywhere near this same scale for battery plant manufacturing. In fact, one (Umicore) has already suspended further construction (apparently) for just this reason. The market for the product does not seem to be materializing.
So touting more and bigger EV battery plants being built and employing many thousands of workers as if a ‘good thing’ I think today suffers a current disconnect from reality. Reaching scale savings for the manufacturing of batteries for the coming wave of EVs also depends on a host of other factors that seem to get very little public coverage of the problems and high costs not being appropriately addressed that will thwart the supposed EV tsunami. But I do understand it presents a good image for politicians.
Responding to a dire existential global emergency is going to have some hiccups. Bottlenecks, dearths, surpluses, delays… The US WWII mobilization was full of them; the FDR administration dealt with them with admirable flexility and agility; simply abandoned programs that weren’t working and pivoted to back up plans. It will always be impossible to get everything exactly right during an emergency; it’s far better to have too many batteries than not enough, not just for EVs, ferries, and trains in dark territory, but for grid storage and household & other building back up.
Are all of those battery plants for cars?
Other large-scale battery users:
– residential storage (e.g., Powerwalls)
– ebikes and scooters
– grid storage
– miscellaneous backup applications
– buses (transit systems and schools)
BEV and PHEV buses are projected to have pretty steady growth compared to cars and pickups, and are not limited by the availability of public chargers. While a typical EV car contains 40kWh (Ford Lightning 98-130kWh), EV buses that charge in a barn range from 250 – 660kWh.