Electric avenue.

Mr. McKenna is policy and planning director at the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. The views expressed in this article are his own.

HOW would you like to pay $100,000 for your next car? Not a Mercedes, mind you, but a car that you can't drive more than a hundred miles at a time (less than that in bad weather); a car that will cost you $30,000 in repairs over its lifetime; a car that would have to sacrifice driving range for luxuries like air conditioning, power windows, and power steering; and a car that, while intended to reduce pollution, may perversely lead to more. If environmental extremists get their way, this is the car of the future. They have already bullied California's legislature into requiring automakers to sell such cars; the logical next step is to force Californians to buy them.

Why should citizens in the vast, sensible heartland care about an electric-car mandate in California? For one thing, the Federal Government, cheered on by enthusiasts such as Vice President Al Gore, is using taxpayers' money to subsidize electric vehicles. The U.S. Department of Energy is spending $260 million a year in an attempt to make batteries for these vehicles more efficient. Furthermore, to spread the economic penalties, Congress has approved a 10 per cent federal income-tax credit for anyone irrational enough to buy an electric vehicle.

Apart from the public costs, there are the costs that private companies are incurring to meet the requirements of command-and-control environmentalism. Ford, for instance, estimates that it will spend $2 billion over the next four years to meet the California mandate. The other automakers will probably spend similar amounts. These expenditures will divert resources from more worthwhile activities. Furthermore, electric vehicles will cost as much as five times what internal-combustion vehicles now cost to produce. To attract buyers, automakers may have to sell them below cost and cover the loss by raising the prices of conventional vehicles. Competition is unlikely to deter such cross-subsidization because every major automaker has to meet the mandate. Given the size of the California market, we will all pay more for cars because of one state's mistake.

And other states are following California's example. Eight states, including New York and Massachusetts, already have laws mandating the sale of electric vehicles. The Ozone Transport Commission -- a body created by the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990 and consisting of representatives from 12 Northeastern states and the District of Columbia -- has asked the Environmental Protection Agency to require member states to mandate cleaner cars, possibly including electric vehicles.

The Making of a Totem

THE electric car is so firmly entrenched as a totem of environmentalists and technocrats that uncomfortable facts are disregarded. Last year the EPA released a draft report showing that the cars are not "zero-emission," as they are advertised to be. Indeed, in some circumstances, they are likely to increase overall emissions. Despite this finding, the California Air Resources Board reaffirmed its commitment to the electric-car mandate the very next month.

The mandate originated in a 1989 recommendation from the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD), the organization established by the California state government to "solve" Southern California's air-quality problem. The legislature turned the recommendation into a mandate calling for 2 per cent of the vehicles sold in 1998 to be "zero-emission vehicles." That requirement grows to 10 per cent, representing about 125,000 cars, by 2003. At the time, it seemed like a simple solution: electric cars don't pollute; conventional cars do. Happily for the environmentalists, the one group in a position to provide probative data on the likely emissions resulting from electric vehicles was California's utilities, which had a vested interest in the electric-car mandate. They were not eager to share any information that did not bolster the case for electric cars.

The California utilities are so eager for the added profits promised by the mandate that they are spurring the environmentalists on by converting their own fleets -- at ratepayers' expense -- to electricity. Dan Fitzgerald, a spokesman for Pacific Gas and Electric, was impolitic enough to explain that the payoff for this PR investment will be the recharging of millions of vehicles at night, when utilities have excess generating capacity. He estimated that the mandate will bring California's utilities an additional $200 million annually by 2005. "One of the ways we're proposing to help manage this load so that it is off-peak is we are developing an electric-vehicle rate that we're proposing to put in place in 1995," he said. "And what that will do will provide for very low-cost refueling during our off-peak periods." A utility's dream: hundreds of thousands of captive customers paying for electricity that the utility has to generate anyway but for which it currently has no buyers.

This alliance of environmentalists and monopolists has taken on national dimensions. One of the most consistent supporters of electric-vehicle mandates has been the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), the lobbying arm of the nation's electric utilities. The EEI has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Department of Energy to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases." As part of that effort, the utilities are contributing $150 million to a fund to develop technologies that may help reduce emissions, including -- you guessed it -- electric cars.

Utilities' efforts to chisel out a market for electric cars take many forms. Con Edison in New York and Northeast Utilities in Connecticut are paying for the privilege of demonstrating the Ford Ecostar. Arizona Public Service sponsors an annual electric-car race. In California, utilities are offering rebates for electric cars and public refueling stations. The costs of these projects are borne by captive ratepayers, not by the utilities' shareholders.

Diane Wittenberg, manager of electric transportation at Southern California Edison, says the electric-car mandate will ultimately lead to lower rates, since the cost of utility infrastructure will be spread over a larger base of ratepayers. But for the time being the mandate will remove motorists from the reasonably well-functioning retail gasoline market and tie them to the dysfunctional, monopolistic retail electricity market. While gasoline prices have been flat or falling over the last two decades, electricity rates have steadily increased from a national average of 4.8 cents per kilowatt-hour in 1969 to 5.6 cents in 1992 (in 1987 dollars).

And this is not likely to change for the better in the short term. Trends toward deregulation in the last 15 years, encouraged and strengthened by the Energy Policy Act of 1992, will probably result in much higher rates for retail customers. This is because large industrial users of electricity, who currently subsidize small users like households, will soon be able to purchase their power from generators other than the local utility. Households, which do not enjoy the same purchasing power as factories and large office complexes, will be left paying for the costs of their local utility's sunk investment. In fact, the California Public Utility Commission just instituted a new regulatory regime that will lead to precisely this situation. Ominously, California's residential electricity rates are already about 50 per cent higher than the national average.

Electric-car users will also face performance problems. GM's Impact, likely to be the first mass-produced electric vehicle, has a range of about one hundred miles. The environmentalists like to note that when GM asked for volunteers to test-drive the Impact, they got 9,300 in Los Angeles and 14,000 in New York, more than twice as many as they expected. But the volunteers were not being asked to buy the cars, which retail for about $100,000, or to replace the batteries, which cost about $15,000 and need to be replaced every forty thousand miles or so.

The Ford Ecostar, a converted minivan, employs sodium - sulphur batteries rather than traditional lead - acid batteries. It also has a range of about one hundred miles. The Ecostar will sell for about $100,000, but Ford officials privately concede that they will lose money at that price. The Ecostar will take about 7 hours to recharge on a 220-volt circuit, about 27 hours on the more common 110-volt circuit. The sodium - sulphur batteries are a bit peskier than lead - acid batteries. If you leave them unplugged for more than 12 hours, you might not be able to recharge them. One severe blackout, and in addition to spoiled meat, you lose your $15,000 battery. Even if you can keep them charged, the Ecostar's batteries need to be replaced every three to five years.

Chrysler's entry in the electric-vehicle market is the TEVan. Its price is also about $100,000, and it has a range of about seventy miles. The TEVan uses conventional lead - acid batteries -- which, in fairness to the Ecostar's sodium - sulphur batteries, can become useless if the temperature falls below a certain point.

Electric-car cheerleaders are quick to point out that new technologies can cut the time needed to recharge the batteries. It's true that in tests such technologies have shown a great deal of promise, recharging cars in 15 to 18 minutes rather than the hours usually required. But the outlets used for rapid recharging would cost about $50,000, and rapid recharging uses far more energy than conventional recharging. The wiring in new houses would probably be adequate for such systems, but older houses would have to be refitted at a cost of $800 to $2,000 each.

Moreover, if a significant proportion of electric-car owners want to rapidly recharge (or even conventionally recharge) their batteries while they're at work during the day, instead of at night as the utilities imagine, much more electricity will be needed on the grid. This will require more power plants. And because such recharging will happen during periods of peak electricity use, rates will go up for everyone. Additional power plants will almost certainly be peaking units -- units that are fired up only when demand spikes upward. These units customarily burn natural gas or, in the Northeast, oil. Their pollution controls are usually less thorough than those of the baseload units that run 24 hours a day. This problem will be especially severe during the hottest days of the summer, when smog formation is most likely (and most troublesome), and during times when inversion layers form, bringing brown clouds to places like Los Angeles and Denver. On especially hot and especially cold days, many utilities in the Northeast run at or near full capacity, even with their peaking units on line. Citizens in Washington, D.C., will remember that the city had to close during a particularly brutal cold snap last year -- not because of the cold per se, but because of lack of generating capacity. Electric vehicles are likely to magnify such problems.

The EPA draft study notes that the amount of power-plant emissions resulting from the use of electric vehicles will depend on several factors, including the source of the power, the fuel used to generate it, and emission-control standards for both autos and power plants. For example, if a peaking unit in the Northeast that burns residual oil is turned on to provide juice to electric vehicles on a hot summer day, it is almost sure to cause more pollution than the vehicles it supplies will avoid. In a typical case -- a coal-fired baseload unit in moderate weather -- the draft study indicates that the first generation of electric vehicles is likely to result in significantly higher emissions than the current generation of gasoline-powered cars. For example, a new gasoline-powered automobile emits about 354 grams of carbon dioxide and 1.18 grams of nitrogen oxides (increasingly viewed as the real culprits in smog formation) per mile. An electric car powered by a lead - acid battery, by contrast, would be responsible for increased power-plant emissions of about 393 grams of carbon dioxide and 1.49 grams of nitrogen oxides per mile. In the next generation, these disparities will grow. The new internal-combustion vehicles required by the California regime, which would be powered by fuels like natural gas and reformulated gasoline, would emit only about 315 grams of carbon dioxide and 0.25 gram of nitrogen oxides per mile.

The EPA is not alone in its skepticism. The Department of Energy projected in an interim study that emissions of nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide would vary dramatically by region. Certain combinations of factors could result in significant overall reductions, while others could result in substantial overall increases. In situations where the utilities are already running flat-out during the summer and would have to turn to peaking units to accommodate the additional load, or where utilities rely heavily on coal or oil, electric vehicles would lead to increased overall emissions. The department also found that, in all scenarios, emissions of sulphur dioxide would increase.

Two other points should be considered. First, premature mass introduction of electric vehicles will force electric-car buyers to struggle with the limitations of currently available models. This will delay consumer acceptance of electric vehicles when they are eventually ready for the marketplace. Second, by raising prices for new cars, mandates will encourage citizens to hold onto their older, less-efficient automobiles. Since fleet turnover has been the most effective means of pollution reduction (1994 models emit, on average, less than 5 per cent of the pollutants of 1974 models), this disincentive will hurt air quality.

Automakers, despite the co-opting of their establishment brethren in the utility business, remain openly skeptical about the market potential of cars that cost at least three times as much as current models, have limited driving ranges, lack accessories, and require replacement of the entire power plant two or three times over their useful lives. John Wallace, director of Ford's Electric Vehicle Planning and Program Office, puts the problem this way: "It's not hard to see that we can build an electric vehicle that's as cheap, or maybe even slightly cheaper than our current internal-combustion-engine vehicles, but it's very hard to see how I'm going to take a battery and have it compete in cost with a $50 fuel tank. The bottom line on cost is the battery." Pam Kueber, Ford's director of environmental communications, is more direct: "We have a mandate to sell electric vehicles. Unfortunately, there is no mandate to buy [them]."

Forcing Technology

IN DEFENSE of the attempt to force electric-car technology through a mandate, Jacqueline Shafer, chairman of the California Air Resources Board, notes that "by using tough anti-smog rules to force technological changes, tailpipe emissions have fallen 90 per cent in the past decade in the Los Angeles basin." This observation strikes at the heart of the problem. Despite the fact that emissions from tailpipes have dropped 90 per cent in the last decade alone, Los Angeles still suffers from a smog problem. Rational people would conclude that the problem is something other than auto emissions -- such as a geography that traps emissions, whether from power plants or tailpipes. They might also conclude that, after removing 90 per cent of the tailpipe emissions with little in the way of results, we might not be well advised to spend enormous amounts of money to remove the last 10 per cent from that source.

But electric-car mandates have little to do with clean air or rationality. They grow out of a world view that despises industrial prowess and business success. The environmentalists are politically unable to outlaw internal-combustion engines, so they have adopted a strategy that focuses on the slow corrosion of the industry that produces them. Vice President Gore is not shy on this point. In Earth in the Balance, he suggests that perhaps the most important strategic goal of the environmental movement should be the elimination of the internal-combustion engine for transportation purposes.

Having bullied legislatures in the two most populous regions of the country into requiring electric vehicles, the extremists are unlikely to stop. After the failures of mass transit and fuel-efficiency standards, they have finally hit upon a successful tactic in their war against Detroit's industrial might and the American love of the automobile. Expect to see it used on a state legislature near you.