The World Is on the Brink of an Electrified Car Revolution
The internal combustion engine had a good run. It has helped propel cars – and thus humanity – forward for more than one hundred years.
But a sea switch is afoot that is forecast to kick gas-powered vehicles to the curb, substituting them with cars that run on batteries. A flurry of news this week underscores just how rapidly that switch could happen.
Robots at the Tesla factory in Fremont, Calif. put together electrical cars.
Credit: Tesla Motors
A quick recap: On Monday, Tesla announced that the Model Three, its mass-market electrified car, would commence rolling off production lines this week with the very first handful delivered to customers later this month. Then on Wednesday, Volvo announced that every car it produces will have a battery in it by 2019, putting it at the forefront of major car manufacturers. Then came France`s announcement on Thursday that it would ban the sale of gas-powered cars by 2040.
All this news dropped just in time for Bloomberg Fresh Energy Finance`s latest electrical car report, which lays out why electrified cars are the way of the future and when they`re projected to take over the market. The authors said albeit electrical vehicles are presently a little fraction of the car market, that market could reach an inflection point sometime inbetween 2025-2030. After that, electrified car sales are slated to increase rapidly.
Driven by the falling cost of batteries and the growing number of automakers producing a broader diversity of electrical cars, Bloomberg NEF expects that electrified cars will account for fifty four percent of all car sales globally by 2040. That`s a hefty uptick from its forecast last year of electrical vehicles accounting for thirty five percent of all sales.
The shift to electrified vehicles will disrupt the fossil fuel industry. The five hundred thirty million total electrified cars forecast to be on the road by two thousand forty will require eight million fewer barrels of oil a day to run.
A fresh forecast for electrical cars shows explosive growth in fresh sales, particularly in China.
Credit: Bloomberg NEF
One of the big pitches for electrical cars is their positive benefit for the climate because they reduce the use of oil. But they will require a lot more power from the electrified grid. Energy use from electrified vehicles is expected to rise three hundred times above current request, putting more strain on power generation.
How that energy is produced will go a long ways toward determining how climate-friendly electrical cars actually are. A latest Climate Central analysis looked at all fifty states and found that the energy mix was clean enough in thirty seven of them to ensure electrical cars are more climate friendly than their most fuel-efficient combustion engine counterparts.
That`s a acute uptick from a two thousand thirteen analysis, which found that there were just thirteen states where electrical cars were cleaner than gas-powered ones, and it`s driven in large part by a precipitous drop in coal use.
While the U.S. is projected to be one of the fattest drivers of the electrical vehicle revolution, China and the European Union will also be major players. By 2025, Bloomberg NEF`s projections demonstrate that China will be the largest buyer of electrical vehicles in the world, a trend that resumes through 2040.
That means how China`s energy mix develops will be one of the most significant factors to determining how climate friendly all the fresh electrified vehicles on the road will be.