For the U.S. to zero out its carbon emissions by 2050, one in four cars on the road will have to be electric by 2030.

“The only question we have to really ask and answer is how easy or hard do we want to make this on ourselves,” said Britta Gross, managing director of the transportation practice at Rocky Mountain Institute.

Gross was speaking at one of Monday’s opening sessions at the Electric Power Research Institute’s (EPRI) four-day Frontiers of e-Mobility virtual forum, and she said, right now, the country is definitely doing that transition the hard way.

“It’s inefficient today. Infrastructure is not where it needs to be; costs aren’t down; interconnection times that utilities [take are] too long,” she said. “We’re drawing it out; we’re doing pilots and demonstrations — five vehicles here, 10 buses there — and everything leads to costs.”

The need for speed, affordability, equity and market-based solutions to rapidly scale the electrification of transportation was the session’s core message, all of which calls for “a holistic approach,” said Michael Berube, deputy assistant secretary for sustainable transportation at the U.S. Department of Energy.

“We have to very much focus on, first and foremost, developing a transportation system that works for all Americans,” Berube said. “The transportation system, whether it be for individuals or businesses, has to get people where they need to go; has to be affordable; has to get the goods there on time.”

Both he and Gross said setting ambitious goals, with clear milestones, is what the U.S. market needs. At present, U.S. auto sales — light-, medium- and heavy-duty — total about 17 million a year, Gross said. New vehicles are now more durable, staying on the road for eight to 12 years, Gross said, citing figures from IHS Markit, and one-quarter of all vehicles now on U.S. roads are 16 years or older.

With that kind of sluggish turnover, “the pace that we’re on, the business-as-usual path, is not going to get us to 2030 [with] any kind of numbers,” she said. “There are sectors that can move today. Urban delivery vehicles [and] short-range vehicles are well within the capabilities of electric vehicle technology today. Both Uber and Lyft have announced electrification goals and commitments by 2030. How do we pull that schedule up sooner?”

Federal, state and municipal fleets should also be early movers to demonstrate scale and “clean up all the systemic challenges that are preventing scale today,” she said. “We can build a blueprint that everyone can use: states can use, utilities can use, cities can use and, of course, fleets across the country can use so that the rest of the market can react and accelerate their own timelines for 2030.

Preparing for Scale

Another reason for setting big goals is to provide certainty for the auto industry and, in turn, help build a domestic supply chain, the two panelists said.

“China and Europe have obviously moved out earlier and a little quicker and more aggressive than the United States” on transportation electrification, Berube said. “And that’s taking up some of the capital and some of the initial investment. There is a lot of opportunity for investments in the U.S. for the supply chain. The most efficient way to get that to happen is if people have a certainty that there is going to be that market there.”

Creating market certainty also means an equally rapid scale-up of charging infrastructure and, in particular, DC fast chargers, Gross said. RMI research suggests that “to support just 50 million EVs in 2030 is going to require at least 300,000 DC fast chargers. Until we really jump on a holistic, national confidence level in public charging, until there’s that confidence that that one big barrier is addressed, the automakers are going to struggle,” she said.

Getting enough chargers installed fast enough will also mean streamlining permitting to attack soft costs, as the solar industry has been doing for years, Gross said. She pointed to the recently released SolarApp, developed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, to allow fast, online permitting for residential solar installations. (See NREL Apps Accelerate Rooftop Approvals.)

“We’ve got to start preparing for scale. It can’t take 18 months to get a DC fast charging hub set up,” Gross said. “We need to come up with some policies, broadly across the U.S. regulatory landscape, that allow for utilities to come in and they’re just responsible for the make-ready [charger installation], and it gets done. There is no special approval you have to get.”

Future-proofing the Transition

Responding to a question about equity, Berube said, DOE is focusing on leveraging vehicle electrification to cut air pollution in low-income and disadvantaged communities. But cutting hard costs also remains a top priority, both he and Gross said, with a goal of getting to battery packs down to $70/kWh and eventually to new EVs with a 300-mile range in the $20,000 range that can then be channeled into the secondary-sales market.

“I firmly believe that people are going to realize how good a value the used EV is because of the lower maintenance and operating cost of it, and the used car market will take off, even quicker than the new car market,” Berube said “It’s just going to take the time of getting new cars to become used cars.”

“When there are products out there like used EVs for $10,000, $6,000, $14,000, I think that changes the game,” Gross agreed. Another high priority is updating the federal investment tax credit to remove the 200,000-vehicle limit on the number of ITC-eligible EVs any one automaker can sell, she said.

Berube also circled back on the importance of building a domestic supply chain for lowering EV costs and keeping them low. “If we don’t have a domestic supply chain, we’re subject to price swings that can be pretty dramatic and hurt the acceleration,” Berube said.

Maintaining momentum on vehicle electrification in a political landscape that can change every four years is still another reason for setting ambitious targets and establishing a firm foundation “to make the agreement on where we’re going clear,” he said. “That will give us the most durability.”

Corporate commitments on fleet electrification by large companies and automakers can also future-proof the transition to electric transportation, Gross said.

“It’s impossible for GM, FedEx, Uber and Lyft to walk back their commitments,” she said. “If we can use these next four years to pile on, then I think there is no walking back. I would just like to see what these commitments all add up to, what they should add up to, where should we all be in 2030 and actually 2025. Where do we need to be in four years?”