Study: 84% of road transportation could be green-electrified by 2050. Democrats should talk this up
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Dan Gearino writes and edits the Clean Economy Weekly newsletter for Inside Climate News, the Pulitzer-winning news site. If you’d like to receive the newsletter, you can sign up here. Here is an item from this week’s edition: This week the NationStudy: 84% of road transportation could be green-electrified by 2050. Democrats should talk this up
Dan Gearino writes and edits the Clean Economy Weekly newsletter for Inside Climate News, the Pulitzer-winning news site. If you’d like to receive the newsletter, you can sign up here. Here is an item from this week’s edition: This week the National Renewable Energy Lab issued a report on the factors that will affect the country's electricity demand through 2050. Most of the major categories of electricity consumption are projected to have modest but steady growth. Then there is transportation, the ultimate wild card. The report shows that EVs would become 11 percent of the vehicle fleet under a base scenario, and range all the way to 84 percent of the fleet under a high-adoption scenario. Everyone should care about this, because a high-electrification scenario means the country is swiftly moving away from gasoline and its harmful emissions, a vital strategy in slowing climate change (provided, of course, the cars are increasingly being fueled by renewables and other low-carbon sources of power). Electrifying transit also must include rail. An example of that already underway is the $2 billion Peninsula Corridor Electrification Project of the commuter CalTrain between San Francisco and San Jose, California. Ground was broken on the project with gold-painted shovels last July. The first trains are expected to be delivered next year and begin running in 2021. It’s estimated the system will be able to move 80 percent more passengers than the current diesel operations, remove 619,000 vehicle miles a day from the state’s roads, and cut 176 metric tons of CO2 emissions a year from the region. Trains will be built by a Salt Lake City, Utah, contractor and assembled at numerous sites across the country. All told, the project is calculated to generate 9,600 direct and indirect jobs in 31 cities, 10 of them in California, and some as far away as Huntington, West Virginia. Read more