Report: Fossil fuel industry underestimating disruptive power of electric vehicles + solar

editor's blog iconI was just surfing and Googling around on the topic of solar-charged driving, EV + PV, etc. when I came across a very interesting article summarizing a report co-authored by the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London and the Carbon Tracker Initiative.

This house with solar shingles, a Tesla Powerwall and two solar-charged Tesla shows what the world could look like — if we all became solar-charged drivers.

The report basically finds that the fossil fuel industry is stuck in BAU mode — Business As Usual — mode, meaning it is not taking the threat posed by electric vehicles + solar combination to its future seriously.

To be sure, the article is published by a group called Carbon Tracker Initiative, which is clearly trying to persuade people to buy into the reality of human-caused climate change.

Not a bad goal, given the increasing intensity and severity of global weather, which very clearly is being affected by climate change.

The summary of the report has got some great quotes. The quotes show that solar-charged driving, meaning the electric car + solar combination that, back in 2009 when I started SolarChargedDriving.Com barely anyone took seriously, or, for that matter, even talked or wrote about, has seriously taken off.

Indeed many, many activist media, and regular media, web sites/news outlets are very much aware of the tremendous disruptive potential of EV + PV, or what is sometimes called “Driving on Sunshine.”



Here are a few of the scathing quotes and statistics from the report below, each one of them taking a major dig at the complacency of the fossil fuel industry –>

  • “Electric vehicles and solar power are game-changers that the fossil fuel industry consistently underestimates.
  • “Solar PV could supply 23 percent of global power generation in 2040 and 29 percent by 2050, entirely phasing out coal and leaving natural gas with just a one percent market share. By contrast, ExxonMobil sees all renewables supplying just 11 percent of global power generation by 2040.”
  • “EVs could make up a third of the road transport market by 2035, more than half the market by 2040 and more than two thirds of market share by 2050. BPā€™s 2017 outlook expects EVs to make up just 6% of the market in 2035.”
  • “Fossil fuels may lose 10 percent of market share to PV and EVs within a single decade ā€” this may not sound much but it can be the beginning of the end once demand starts to decline. A 10 percent loss of power market share caused the collapse of the US coal mining industry.”

In fact, it’s only a matter of time before renewables — which more and more experts are establishing could indeed power the world 100 percent! — overrun fossil fuels and replace them once and for all.