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India Aims To Become 100% Electric Vehicle Nation By 2030 (ndtv.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report on NDTV: The Indian government is working on a scheme to provide electric cars on zero down payment for which people can pay out of their savings on expensive fossil fuels, for becoming 100% electric vehicle nation by 2030. "India can become the first country of its size which will run 100 per cent of electric vehicles. We are trying to make this program self-financing," said Piyush Goyal, Power Minister. That's forward thinking. However, it's not clear whether the Indian government is also committing to 100% renewable energy -- because if the electricity comes from coal, it might not help with curtailing the pollution level.
Once the cars are electric, they automatically benefit from any changes in how the electricity is made without any action or investment by the end user.
Yes. I totally agree.
Compare this with the logistics complexities to introduce new types of fuels (either deploying biofuel alternative, or something more fundamentally different like hydrogen).
Deployment of electric car make subsequently moving to greener power plant easier than moving to greener fuels.
And that's neglecting even slight advantages of fossil power-plant over cars:
Power plants only need to be efficient, they don't need to compromise on size and weight to be put inside a travelling car, unlike an internal combustion engine.
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"India can become the first country of its size which will run 100 per cent of electric vehicles. We are trying to make this program self-financing,"
They've got a LOT of electrical infrastructure to fix before this is anything more than a pipe dream. Electric outages in India aren't terribly rare in large parts of the country as of the last time I checked. Not to mention the challenges of installing all the charging infrastructure.
They're called Auto rickshaws and they're actually pretty damned handy. India has something more like traffic loose guidelines more than they have traffic laws, and these make it work. They're a lot more simple in terms of design so it wouldn't be too difficult to build an electric motor and replace the existing one. They're fun as well and far more economical as a short range taxi than European or American cabs. I wouldn't mind seeing them adopted in more American cities where it makes sense, especially in the parts of California where it's typically pleasant.
The big problem is that India's grid is already over stressed and has problems keeping up as is, and this is in a country where a lot of people live in poverty and don't have any access to power. Putting all of the countries vehicles on that grid isn't going to work without a massive overhaul of the infrastructure. Maybe this plan or goal is the impetus to make that happen as well, but as things currently stand it's utterly impossible even if they could make the electric vehicles inexpensively.
That's not forward thinking, that is naïve. Replacing all cars by electric ones just means the energy is produced elsewhere. Like in coal powerplants. It just moves the exhaust elsewhere. The energy then needs to be transported (huge in comparison with regular household connections), then stored in batteries. Those batteries are not exactly clean to produce or recycle.
Don't get me wrong, there's a place for electric cars, but tossing fossil fuel lock stock and barrel is incredibly expensive and frankly just naïve.
For U.S. maybe. It's got Texas, and fracking oil. Imagine a country needing three times the oil that U.S. requires, without any production of petroleum in the country.
Now, imagine, all of the petroleum is being purchased at incredibly high prices, and all of the foreign exchange reserves you have are spent on oil. So you must keep exporting everything you make, to meet your oil import bill, instead of promoting consumption led growth in your own country.
With that kind of an economic structure, replacing all gasoline cars with all electric cars makes imminent sense. And couple that with plans to generate 200GW of solar power, instead of the current 3GW of solar power. It's a radical solution for 1 Billion people, economically, environmentally and in terms of sheer market power. It's going to move the world, instead following the world.