Juno News - January 01, 2023


Is Canada ready for electric vehicles？


Episode Stats

Length

3 minutes

Words per Minute

191.65547

Word Count

761

Sentence Count

41


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.200 I'm predicting that 2023 is going to see a pivot in the way Canadians think about electric vehicles and their growing prevalence in society.
00:00:09.680 A pivot that will see them asking a few more critical questions that so far the general population hasn't really been talking about all that much.
00:00:18.840 What do I mean about all of this?
00:00:20.400 Well, we've generally been thinking about electric vehicles as something that is just coming more and more into society.
00:00:25.940 Their sales are increasing and that's all true and the price is going down a little bit and that is all true as well.
00:00:30.960 And most particularly, government getting more and more involved in mandating these things and poking around into the business in general.
00:00:38.340 We all know about the rebates that government provides to people buying electric vehicles.
00:00:42.480 But now we have Justin Trudeau's liberal government mandating actual sales quotas.
00:00:47.720 So they've just announced that by 2026, 20% of car manufacturers' sales have to be electric vehicles.
00:00:55.940 It has to be 100% by 2035, meaning banning all vehicles other than electric vehicles when it comes to new sales.
00:01:04.820 Now, I think Canadians maybe just looking at things from what they've seen in the headlines go,
00:01:09.640 okay, things are trending in that direction, which they are to some degree.
00:01:12.620 And okay, this is kind of inevitable, which it is to some degree.
00:01:15.580 But most of the talking points around electric vehicles that people have sort of internalized, taken for granted,
00:01:21.740 they have all been about the positives about all this.
00:01:24.600 And yeah, there's some positives and just how momentum is going in that direction.
00:01:28.180 Fine.
00:01:28.760 But there are some critical questions that people have brought up about this that you're going to hear more and more about.
00:01:34.960 And I want to bring up just two items that we are starting to hear more and more about.
00:01:38.740 One is the question of whether or not the grid can actually handle bringing in more and more electric vehicles to that degree in this short amount of time.
00:01:48.760 The basic idea being that electric vehicles, well, they require energy to charge, lots of energy.
00:01:54.620 And right now we have a grid that at times even struggles with certain aspects.
00:01:58.560 California, notoriously this summer, actually told electric vehicle owners to stop plugging into the grid to the system
00:02:05.280 because they were worried about blackouts during a heat wave.
00:02:08.960 Therefore, showing us, yes, we do have a problem with these new technologies being put onto the grid.
00:02:14.420 Now, it's funny, if you Google around to that issue, you'll see this debunked as a myth in some articles
00:02:19.480 because people are very unhappy about this being talked about.
00:02:22.060 But what they're just debunking is they're saying,
00:02:23.840 no, no, the grid will be upgraded in time to be consistent with the number of EVs that more and more people are getting.
00:02:30.920 Okay, fine.
00:02:31.560 So you're actually acknowledging that the grid as it is today can't handle all of this.
00:02:35.820 And you're assuming that the grid will be updated.
00:02:38.780 And maybe it will, maybe it won't.
00:02:40.280 A lot of these infrastructure things actually take a lot longer than we think they will.
00:02:44.540 Number two, you're hearing a lot of people, yes, people who want to naysay electric vehicles,
00:02:48.800 but also environmentalists and some activists talking about how incredibly emissions intensive and pollution intensive it is
00:02:55.980 to get some of the elements that are required in making electric vehicles in terms of the mining and refining processes.
00:03:03.080 So I think we're going to hear those issues brought up in 2023, more so than they've been before.
00:03:09.060 I think the two items I just brought up, regular folks who don't follow these issues,
00:03:13.360 I think they haven't really heard about them yet.
00:03:15.140 They're not on the front page of the newspapers, if you know what I mean.
00:03:18.400 So none of this means that electric vehicles are not going to happen.
00:03:22.480 They're obviously happening and they're growing and people are choosing,
00:03:25.700 the consumer is choosing to head more and more in that direction.
00:03:28.540 But this idea that government can force you to go in that direction in a certain timeline,
00:03:33.920 like Justin Trudeau is really aggressively trying to do,
00:03:36.860 that's the stuff that I think is going to hit up against reality.
00:03:40.540 It's really idealism meets reality.
00:03:43.480 And that's what we're going to see in 2023 when it comes to electric vehicles.
00:03:48.640 I think so.
00:03:49.540 But I think that's not something that I don't want to know.
00:03:54.580 Okay.
00:03:57.080 But we're going to see here.