This commentary is by Greg Pierce of St. Albans, a retired professional civil engineer.
Vermont fueling stations (gasoline, kerosene, diesel) are a large part of the Vermont small business scene. Will these businesses disappear if the Vermont Climate Council’s climate action plan and the Vermont Department of Public Service’s comprehensive energy plan concept of exclusively battery-powered electric vehicles comes to fruition?
These businesses not only sell fuel; the majority are also handy convenience stores carrying a variety of products the motoring public demands. If electric power companies, such as Green Mountain Power, place a multitude of electric battery charging stations all over the countryside, will they also include convenience stores with food, snacks, beverages, restrooms and the like? Doubtful.
Will types of businesses, other than motor vehicle filling stations, want to yield present customer parking space to battery-powered electric vehicle drivers who only want to use the store’s parking spaces for charging their car’s battery? Doubtful.
Loss of the present-day fossil fueling stations with their associated convenience store business is only one of several big hits on Vermont’s economy. Another is loss of open land to new state-sponsored battery-charging car parks, which would be a serious environmental impact — and clearly avoidable if hydrogen fuel-cell electric vehicles are encouraged to compete with battery-powered electric vehicles.
A more desirable approach would be to forget about battery-powered electric vehicles altogether, and push for hydrogen fuel-cell electric vehicles. Vermont fueling stations now dispensing fossil fuels could easily evolve into hydrogen fueling stations by adding hydrogen storage tanks and hydrogen-dispensing nozzles and hoses, while slowly phasing out existing fossil fuel pumps.
Vermont Gas Systems stands to maintain current economic strength or even gain ground by switching to hydrogen. Some future hydrogen filling stations would likely stand to improve profits if they were near a Vermont Gas hydrogen pipeline, which they could connect to and thereby save the hydrogen tank truck transportation cost.
Vermont distributors of fossil fuel heating oil and propane gas for winter heating of homes and businesses will be out of business unless they are encouraged by the climate action plan and the comprehensive energy plan to contract with new hydrogen supply sources such as Vermont Gas Systems, and then deliver hydrogen, by tank truck, to farms and outlying businesses and residences that are unlikely to be served by new hydrogen pipelines due to remote locations.
Battery-powered electric farm tractors and trucks will never effectively compete with hydrogen fuel cell-powered farm tractors and trucks.
Green Mountain Power GMP and other electric power utilities will have to undergo major capacity upgrades to service the new battery electric power regime that the current drafts of the climate plan and the energy plan are encouraging. Huge — by Vermont standards — capital expenditures will be required. Significant financial gains to the power utilities will be at the expense of existing businesses that will likely close if only battery-powered electric vehicles are available to the Vermont motoring public.
Although it would be a nice benefit, from the standpoint of the small stock ownership base of Green Mountain Power, what would be a much better situation for the overall Vermont community as well as for Green Mountain Power’s public image would be for it and other public electric utilities to undertake systemwide improvements similar to what was done for the town of Panton.
In Panton, Green Mountain Power has set up a trial distribution micro-grid that will protect its Panton customers from the greater regionwide/nationwide grid blackouts or brownouts due to weather disasters or other unpredictable causes. One important difference needs to be built into future microgrids that Green Mountain Power or other public electric utilities might undertake, and that is the substitution of hydrogen fuel cells as the temporary replacement power source in lieu of large, dangerous electric battery complexes.
Moving to a future hydrogen energy regime, instead of an all-electric energy regime, would yield a big bonus for the Vermont environment by ending the worry about leaking underground fossil fuel storage tanks, which have polluted Vermont groundwater in the past. If a hydrogen tank springs a leak, the hydrogen moves up out of the ground, into the air, disperses and, over time, marries up with oxygen molecules to form pure water vapor. No pollution danger.
A big bonus to the Vermont motoring public who adopt hydrogen fuel-cell electric vehicles will be the much larger range — 500 miles — over battery-powered vehicles — 300 miles — and an end to the worry called “range anxiety.”
Attention, legislators! Let free market forces make the decision. Please take action now to require the Vermont Climate Council and the Vermont Department of Public Service to rewrite their climate and energy plans to give equal weight to the benefits of hydrogen fuel-cell autos as competitors to battery electric autos and let the Vermont motoring public decide the issue — through their vehicle purchase choice — as to which energy regime is the best fit for Vermont.
