Instead of being left in the dark, Californians may now be stranded by the side of the road if state officials insist on moving forward with the 2003 zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) program.
The state is still recovering from blackouts and red ink because of a utility restructuring plan that assumed California was an island oasis immune to unpredictable energy markets.
Amazingly, regulators that oversee California's environmental and energy interests are still talking past each other, even now.
At a time when the state utility commission has been seeking higher retail rates and encouraging conservation, environmental regulators refuse to back down from a rule that could drain the still fragile power grid by mandating ZEVs, i.e., electric cars.
Car mandates
The California Air Resources Board stresses it is not suggesting every motorist drive a ZEV. Nevertheless, it wants automakers within 2 years to dedicate at least 2% of their sales in the state to vehicles that, in effect, are more expensive and require more refueling than traditional cars.
No one argues CARB's goals are laudable: clean air and energy independence.
ZEVs reduce pollutants by more than 90% when compared with the cleanest conventional gasoline-powered vehicles, the agency says. And this is true even when factoring in emissions from power plants generating the electricity charge for ZEVs.
But it's questionable if the state and automakers have the financial resources to build up an expensive electric recharging infrastructure, even if electric supplies are temporarily plentiful. The state's chances that it can raise a $12.5 billion bond issue to help pay for the electric restructuring debacle are already cloudy.
"Adding the additional load required by [electric vehicles, or EVs] seems to be a bit counterintuitive at this point," said Christine Uspenski, an electricity analyst with Schwab Capital Markets LP, adding, "particularly since individual consumers that use more than a baseline volume of power pay higher rates-hardly an incentive to bypass the gasoline pump with petroleum product prices easing."
CARB expects EVs to be used in fleets, but the higher rates that utility ratemakers would like to level on businesses vs. residents is another disincentive, Uspenski adds.
Another way
Other states that followed California's lead in the early 1990s on ZEVs for federal clean air reasons say they still want ZEVs, but they also want to be realists.
New York, Massachusetts, and Vermont are expected to delay their programs until 2007.
If that happens, California will be the lone ZEV market in 2003, making a bad sales picture worse for automakers that are already struggling with a declining sales forecast.
Clean air goals should not be abandoned. But it might make sense to embrace what Northeast states are mulling: push ZEV mandates back at least 3 years and give automakers that produce clean alternatives, such as hybrid electric-gasoline vehicles already being prepared for the 2003 model year, credits that could be applied toward the ZEV rule later.
