[The Vector] Some Electric Vehicles Reporters Have Wicked Slants to Their Coverage

I love these newspaper writers who spend about 10 minutes learning about electric transportation before publishing an article that will affect the thinking and behavior of many thousands of readers. Couldn’t this journalist from Canada’s “Globe and Mail” have stuck with whatever she was covering last week — local gossip or junior varsity ice hockey games — before she decided to go after a subject of real importance?

In the first line of her article: The Long, Hard Road Ahead for Electric Cars, reprinted here by EVWorld.com, we have:

Only one week after the much-hyped rollout of electric cars at the Los Angeles Auto Show, Canadian news media carried reports about how Ontario electricity costs are expected to double over the next 20 years.

How much certainly do we have about electricity prices 20 years hence? And what does the Globe and Mail think might happen to Ontario’s gasoline prices as crude oil becomes increasingly scarce and the means of generating electricity with clean technologies continues to expand?

Also, as I’m sure the author knows, the 2010 L.A. Auto show was a snooze from an EV perspective. It wasn’t “much-hyped,” and it certainly wasn’t an EV “rollout.” There was far more EV fanfare in each of the 2008 and 2009 LA Auto Shows than there was at the 2010.

A few lines later, we have:

Will there be enough electricity? Even the staggering electricity rate increases announced by Ontario would not generate nearly enough power to handle a large auto-recharge load, nor could already stretched power grids handle it, either. Wind and solar generate less than 1 per cent of Canada’s power supply.

So you expect me to believe that the Globe and Mail doesn’t know that EVs, generally charged at night with off-peak power, will put very close to zero strain on the electrical grid for the foreseeable future?

And regarding the percentage penetration of renewables, might that change as Canada and the rest of the world experiences the steady fall in the cost of clean energy technology?

She continues:

The most spectacular example of the sky-rocketing cost of subsidies can be seen in Ontario, where the Liberal government forces consumers to pay 16 times as much for solar power, and three times more for wind, as the current average electricity rate.

A friend in Ontario, whom I called a few minutes ago, had no idea what this could possibly mean.

I’m supposing that the real aim here is to attack the “Liberal government.” Whatever. Just do it a more honestly, and try to live up to your obligation to cover important topics like this fairly.