"Utilities Should Charge Into Electric Vehicles"

"The total potential market for electricity fueling American vehicles is staggering (warning: large back-of-envelope ahead).Let's just take light-duty vehicles (not heavy trucks or buses), of which there were about 190 million on the road in 2015, according to government figures. For the sake of simplicity, replace them all with a full battery-electric vehicle that gets 3.5 miles per kilowatt-hour, loses 10 percent of the power it takes as it charges and discharges, and travels 13,000 miles a year.Presto! You've basically created an entirely new center of demand for power rivaling the entire industrial sector of the U.S.:"

https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2017-10-03/electri...

Well you need to subtract what is currently burned off in refineries in those calculations it is quite significant (roughly same amount of energy for refining oil and electric cars per mile driven but only 1/5 or so in electricity and rest in burning oil products).

Gasoline cars use lots of electricity...

There isn't much additional profit in the selling of additional electrons to consumers for a number of reasons, not limited to the fact that electric utilities are regulated monopolies, and widespread decoupling[1] of utility rates which incentivizes utilities to get customers to save electricity.

The profit to be made is in the building of the generation capacity itself. The problem with this is that coal plants and traditional nuclear plants are very expensive to build compared to natural gas plants and renewables like wind and solar.

After being built, they are very expensive to fuel and maintain compared to renewables.

So utilities are more likely to choose natural gas or renewables for new generation capacity. It's not that the coal industry hasn't tried to convince people that they are the fuel of the future (i.e. the "Clean Coal" marketing effort), but the costs just don't line up in coal's favor, and that's not even considering the cost of the currently unaccounted externalities of coal burning.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoupling_(utility_regulation...

That's why I said "coal and nuclear industries" rather than electric utilities. Even if the generators aren't making money from increased output someone still needs to mine the minerals that power those plants. While I agree that those technologies are not viable in the long term, in the short term their interests (staying in business a few more years) align with the long term interests of the environmentalists (who want to decouple transportation from fossil fuels which is impossible with ICEs).

>why the coal and nuclear industries haven't been promoting electric vehicles more vigorously to drive demand for electricity

Well, on the coal side, they can hardly maintain that coal isn't bad for the environment whilst simultaneously claiming that electric cars are better.

There are advantages that electric cars have that have nothing to do with their evironmental benefits. They have massive torque, smooth acceleration, are silent at low speeds, you never have to go to a gas station, fewer moving parts so less to go wrong, etc. And even on the most coal-intensive grids in the US electric vehicles produce less greenhouse gas emissions than the average ICE vehicle and there's still a public health benefit to displacing non-GHG emissions away from cities where people live.

Although, coal produces its pollution many miles away from population centres, whereas internal combustion cars produce it feet away from people breathing it in on city pavements.

Nuclear in particular should be promoting it, it matches perfectly with the overnight charging demand. Perhaps in that case it's just that nuclear isn't that significant an industry, they have enough effort trying to promote themselves.

Certainly it's strange that utilities in general aren't all guns blazing for electric cars, I suspect we'll see that start to happen soon.

Various utilities give $10K rebates on EV purchases. I've never run the numbers to see how that works out for them economically. Though they often get government support to roll out insulation and other efficiency improvements so maybe it falls under that.

The ones that pay to control the timing of EV charging make more immediate sense to me.

Electric vehicles = widely-available high-capacity batteries = solar eats their lunch, very very quickly

I don't think electric vehicles lack promotion.

When was the last time you saw or heard an ad for a electric car? If you went into a car dealership, would you expect the salesperson to recommend an electric car to you if you didn't ask?

> would you expect the salesperson to recommend an electric car

Not in the US perhaps but here in Norway I think I might. It has a lot to do with the attitude of the authorities and how much they are willing to skew the market in particular directions. In the past they skewed it for diesels now for electric. The US has historically tended to skew the market to favour on-shore producers, regardless of what they made, at the expense of imported vehicles. Now there are subsidies for electric cars so I can easily imagine that there will soon be a time when a salesperson recommends an electric car even in the US.

Every single day for months.

I ended up buying one. Tesla doesn't advertise much, but Chevy, Toyota, Nissan, BMW etc sure do.