[L]awmakers came out in favor of buying electric buses with almost $19 million coming to Vermont from a “clean diesel” fraud case against Volkswagen.
However, the deputy secretary of the agency that decides how to spend the fund questioned whether to put the money toward more clean diesel vehicles instead.
The Agency of Natural Resources is writing a plan for the money, and in the coming weeks the agency will release the plan to the public, Deputy Secretary Peter Walke said.
Lawmakers and advocates Thursday floated a range of potential uses for the money, which is due to the state in thirds over the coming three years.
Members of the eight-legislator Joint Energy Committee spoke in favor of purchasing electric school buses. Lawmakers tried unsuccessfully last year to pass a law that would have directed the VW settlement money toward that purpose.
“If you focus on electrification of school buses and transit buses, it could really be transformative,” said Rep. Mary Sullivan, D-Burlington.
Slowing Vermont’s transportation-related pollution is a key goal in the state’s energy and environmental policies. Sullivan and several others said electric school buses could meaningfully further this goal.
Transportation is responsible for 47 percent of Vermont’s greenhouse gas emissions, the Vermont Natural Resources Council’s Kate McCarthy told the committee, and transportation accounts for around 40 percent of the state’s energy use, according to the Vermont Comprehensive Energy Plan.
Vermonters will need to swap out tens of thousands of existing vehicles for electric models if the state is to meet its goal of having 10 percent of automobiles in the state powered by renewable energy by 2025, said Jennifer Wallace-Brodeur, the director of transportation efficiency for Vermont Energy Investment Corp.
But free-market forces on their own won’t lead Vermont to reach the state’s renewable energy goals, said Dan Dutcher, senior environmental policy analyst with the Vermont Agency of Transportation, and state policies encouraging electric vehicles are “perhaps the most important measure Vermont can take in the transportation sector.”
Guy Page, however, a lobbyist who has worked for the American Petroleum Institute, argued for less intervention by the state.
People have a moral imperative to avert global warming, and the free market is the force to carry that out, Page said. To illustrate his point, Page told of a Vermont car dealer’s recent success in selling more than 150 electric vehicles.
The federal government subsidized most of those vehicles with a $7,500 tax rebate, according to Robert Dostis, a Green Mountain Power vice president.
The $18.7 million the ANR will spend is part of a multibillion-dollar settlement the German automaker VW reached this year with the U.S. Department of Justice after the company fraudulently sold 11 million “clean diesel” vehicles with devices that concealed their actual levels of air pollution.
Sullivan said it would be a mistake to invest the “clean diesel” fraud settlement funds in still more “clean diesel.”
The Vermont Public Interest Research Group’s Sarah Wolfe pushed the same view.
“We don’t want to go forward and end up funding new diesel buses after this scandal,” Wolfe told legislators.
Electric school buses would cost more up-front than diesel models, she said. A Vermont Energy Investment Corp. study last year estimated they’d run in the range of $350,000, as opposed to around $100,000 for a diesel bus, but that cost is offset by lower fuel and maintenance costs.
The entirety of the settlement funds could be spent on electric buses, Walke said, but the significant cost difference could make the spend hard to justify.
There might be merit in waiting before spending all or a portion of the settlement funds, Walke said, because the price of new technology is rapidly decreasing. The money does need to be spent within 10 years, he said.
The ANR is soliciting public opinion on the matter, and will release a draft plan for public comment soon, he said.
Correction: A statement on the number of electric cars needed to meet energy goals was misattributed to Kate McCarthy. That statement was made by Jennifer Wallace-Brodeur of VEIC.
