Electric Cars Are the Key to Energy Independence

Al Gore's heroic speech challenging us to make our electrical system 100 percent renewable promised it would simultaneously address three major crises: the weak economy, catastrophic climate change and the dire national security problems inherent in our dependence on imported oil.

He got two out of three right. A crash renewable electricity initiative would provide an immediate boost to our economy and could slow climate change, since electricity accounts for about a third of our overall greenhouse gas emissions.

But it would do little to enhance our national security.

Oil generates only 3 percent of our electricity. Therefore a 100 percent renewable electricity system does little to reduce our oil dependency -- unless that electricity is used to substitute for oil in our transportation system.

Al Gore knows this. In other venues he has mentioned electrified vehicles. But he needs to make electrifying our transportation the central element in his 10-year plan, for at least two reasons.

One is that it is an initiative that would prove far more compelling to the vast majority of Americans. Climate change is abstract, and the strategies to resolve it are remote. Our relationship to our vehicles, on the other hand, is both concrete and visceral. We desperately want to get off oil, especially when gasoline prices rise to $4 per gallon.

But it is more than a pocketbook issue for many of us; it is a moral issue. Americans hate being dependent for our mobility, and therefore for our livelihoods, on countries often hostile to our way of life. Electric cars promise to end that dependency.

And as a bonus, with rooftop solar cells, we can become independent not only from OPEC but from remote and often unresponsive utility companies. We can become energy producers as well as energy consumers.

And then there is the plain fact that once significant numbers of electric vehicles are on the roads, word of mouth will be a powerful marketing tool. The reason? As Marc Geller, a longtime advocate of electric vehicles, told me a year ago as we were traveling up Route 1 in Northern California in his all-electric small SUV, "Anyone who drives an electric car falls in love with an electric car." That love affair will be aided and abetted by a population eager to embrace a homegrown fuel and vehicles that offer quicker propulsion, a quiet drive and zero tailpipe emissions.

There is another persuasive reason for Gore to focus on an electrified transportation system: It is simply physically impossible to convert our entire electricity system to renewables in 10 years, but it is possible to convert our entire ground transportation system to renewable electricity within a similar time frame. That would require a national mobilization, to be sure, but it can be done.

Converting our electric system fully to renewables would require us to shut down about 80 percent of our current electricity-generating capacity, much of it low-cost, already paid off and capable of generating electricity for another 25 years or more. Moreover, to reach very high penetration rates of renewable electricity would require that we overcome the principal shortcoming of wind and sunlight: intermittency.

To electrify our transportation system, on the other hand, we could displace rather than shut down the existing system, and we would be replacing a physical stock with a relatively short life expectancy. Given the average seven-year life expectancy of existing vehicles and the high probability that we would offer an incentive for owners of older gasoline-powered vehicles to trade them in, new electric vehicles could constitute the entire fleet within a decade, and that doesn't take into account the potential for conversions of existing vehicles.

Powering 100 percent of our transportation system would require about 30 percent of the electricity generated in 2006. With a massive effort, using a combination of solar and wind power, we could generate about that much electricity by 2020.