This commentary is by Greg Pierce of St. Albans, a retired professional civil engineer.
The presently proposed versions of the Vermont Climate Council’s Climate Action Plan and the Vermont Department of Public Service Comprehensive Energy Plan are now public documents. They are both losers.
But the real losers are Vermonters who had reason to expect a better performance out of both the climate council and the public service department. If the Vermont Legislature chooses to accept these documents without major revisions, a lot of bad outcomes are in the offing for Vermonters.
This commentary is the first in a series intended to outline and discuss a few of the most obvious problems with the energy plan and the climate action plan.
What we’ve come to expect is the usual, the ordinary, the customary.
There are approximately 650,000 Vermonters and approximately 240,000 motor vehicles registered in Vermont. Let’s make a conservative assumption that there are a quarter of a million licensed Vermont drivers.
It would not be unreasonable to further assume that, once each month, a third of our Vermont motoring population visits a gasoline filling station. Customarily, their experience involves exiting their vehicle, arranging fuel payment, usually at the pump, occasionally within the filling station building, then operating one of the station’s fueling pumps and filling their tank, finally reentering their vehicle and driving away. The whole experience is five to ten minutes, max.
Sensibly, if you were using good judgment in planning for a new nonpolluting auto fuel source, a first and most important criteria would be to carefully avoid the least possible upset and/or distress to the motoring public. Two upset and/or distress factors come to mind.
First off, familiarity with the process of fueling the vehicle. If it’s a hydrogen vehicle — an FCEV — no sweat; as usual, you pay at the pump or inside the station, then you operate the pump in the usual and customary manner with the notable exception that you don’t insert a nozzle loosely into the vehicle fill pipe but instead you press the end of the hose into the vehicle’s fill pipe and swivel a lock collar to make the pressure-tight connection required for hydrogen refueling. You finish refueling and depart the station in approximately the same amount of time you previously used to spend in fossil fueling stations.
Now, the second upset and/or distress obstacle: If, in the future, you were essentially forced to purchase a battery powered auto — an electric vehicle — because the ill-considered planning action of the energy plan and the climate plan didn’t give you any better purchase option than an EV, you’re in a far different situation. Either you’ve had to bear the expense of a home auto battery charging station or you’ve had to drive to a battery charging park where you will wait an hour or more until your vehicle’s battery is charged.
And, of course, we haven’t even addressed the foolishness of having to wait an hour every 300 miles or so, if you’re making the 1,500-mile auto trip to Florida.
Do Vermonters want to wait an hour to refuel their auto or are they expecting their state government to maintain the status quo as part of a well-thought-out, sensibly considered plan for the transition out of fossil fuels and into a new nonpolluting energy regime? I believe the answer is patently clear.
Attention, legislators! Please put a stop to the present planning foolishness of the first draft of the energy plan and the climate plan and insist on rewrites of those plans to include not just the poor option of EVs but the far more logical option of FCEVs for Vermont’s new generation of nonpolluting motor vehicles.
