As electric-vehicle sales mount, observers are finding benefits to society—especially to electric ratepayers—that sometimes surpass the benefits to the EV buyers.
Tesla Model S (Image: T. Larkum)
“These vehicles use a different kind of fuel and plug into our electricity system, and the good news about that is that there are a number of cost-benefit studies that are showing this can be really beneficial to all rate payers, not just the drivers of the vehicles,”
said Matt Stanberry, the managing director of the advanced transportation program for the trade group Advanced Energy Economy.
“As you increase electricity sales for charging the vehicles, it has the effect of driving down rates for all ratepayers because it spreads the fixed cost of the system out across a larger volume of sales.”
That sounds like the opposite of the scenario feared several years ago in which rooftop solar would enable homeowners to abandon the grid, concentrating fixed costs on the shrinking population that remains.
Recent studies have analyzed the impact of EVs in five Northeastern States and in California and found hundreds of dollars per car in annual benefits to three groups: to EV owners in saved fuel and maintenance costs, to electric ratepayers in reduced fixed costs, and to society in reduced carbon emissions.
Read more: Forbes