Electric Cars for Hawaii
Environmental planners in Hawaii believe that electric cars will make a significant difference in their effort to fight climate change.
The problem is how to get the number of Hawaii drivers to give up their gasoline powered vehicles and move to electric ones.
At the present time 1.5 out of 100 cars on Hawaiis roads are electric - 15,000 out of the estimated one million. This represents significant growth. To give some idea of the rapid growth of electric cars in Hawaii, there were only 311 electric cars on Hawaii in 2011. After, California Hawaii has the highest number of electric cars per capita in the US. The future seems bright.
Why not? There are significant incentives: $7,500 is offered in Federal tax credits, there is freedom to use the carpool lane even with one person., there are nearly 100 different electric car models. In addition, electric cars are significantly cheaper to maintain and operate than conventional gasoline ones. Electric cars now offer range of 258 miles so there is less worry about breaking down.
HECO has expressed in documents that it is entirely reasonable for the state of Hawaii to anticipate 500,000 electric cars on Hawaii’s roads by 2050.
Hawaiian Electric is preparing to create 3,600 charging stations to help accommodate them in 2030. On August 5 2021 , President Joe Biden signed an executive order that would encourage 50% of the cars sold in the US to be electric vehicles by the year 2030.
However, there is a problem; the cars have to be charged. There are three basic kinds of chargers, the level 1 and 2 that can take 6 to 20 hours and the level 3 that can take 30 - 45 minutes. It is estimated that to accommodate 500,000 cars it would take spending of $2.9 billion dollars to purchase and put in the chargers and double the existing HECO grid capacity to take the sudden charging load.
This would mean $150 million per year in capital improvement funds for HECOs relatively small grid over the next 20 years. In 2020 HECO spent $335 million on all other kinds of improvements.
Is this reasonable? HECO seems to think so. It put out this strategic plan
https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/documents/clean_energy_hawaii/electrification_of_transportation/201803_eot_roadmap.pdf
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