Dealers believe Baton Rouge customers will embrace electric trucks

By Julia-Claire Evans  Thursday, June 24, 2021 businessreport.com

Research suggests that drivers of popular-brand pickups and SUVs may be a tough sell for electric vehicles for a variety of reasons, Axios reports, but it may not be the case for Baton Rouge.

When electrically powered trucks hit the market and become more readily available, some Baton Rouge auto dealers say their customers are likely to purchase them.

Though All-Star Automotive hasn’t received many electric trucks yet, owner Matt McKay thinks Baton Rouge drivers are likely to purchase them. 

“I don’t think these manufacturers would sell them if they hadn’t done their due diligence on the cars,” he says. “Our other electric cars we’re already selling are doing very well.”

Robinson Brothers Ford already has 55 reservations for people who want to order the F-150 Lighting, the recently announced electric truck coming in 2022, General Manager Chris Savage says. 

While electric trucks are not fully available at Gerry Lane yet, Eric Lane, president of Gerry Lane Enterprises, says customers will definitely buy them in the future.

Gerry Lane stores will soon have electric vehicle charging stations, Lane says, and that way buyers can be assured they’ll have a place to charge their new electric vehicles. 

Change is coming, Lane says, and he thinks Baton Rouge could become the leading city in Louisiana for alternative fuels.

“Baton Rouge, as the capital city with three large universities, there’s a place for electric vehicles here,” Lane says. “There’s probably more of a place here than there is in any other city in Louisiana.”

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Sounds like LSU should put in some charging stations since universities tend to be hotbeds of early adopters. I'm sure the board of directors for the LSU Union building, which includes student representatives, will eventually start rolling the bandwagon in that direction, if they haven't already done so. Years back, the Student Union building was the primo place to park when I worked for the Louisiana Geological Survey on campus, filing drilling reports for the whole state. Talk about a warren of metal cabinets. Back then, the State Geologist knew the value of wise political maneuvering.  

They are already asking us to conserve electricity during heat waves so I'm sure the eco genius's are already working on an upgrade to the electric grid to accommodate all these new electric vehicles (rolling my eyes as I typed that).

Those without "retail" electric service have better grid reliability than Texas.  Lower costs via competitive retail providers turned out to not be a great system for ensuring grid reliability.  There is no national problem with the amount of electric generation.  There are regional challenges with grid connectivity.  The infrastructure bill now being debated in Washington includes funding for grid upgrades.  The grid, like much of America's infrastructure, has been neglected for too long.  Time to invest for the future.  And that future will include many electric vehicles including some pretty cool pick em up trucks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmission_grid

Talking about the grid, a fed guy (who works oversight on some of the western hydro dams) told me that due to the drought water shortages, that they'll be turning off the hydro generation for Hoover Dam and Glen Dam. And maybe that's yet another reason why NG hub prices have been spiking. Green/clean hydro is vital to keeping the A/C on during a heatwave in certain places. Those folks in Vegas may have more sweaty sizzle coming their way besides the gambling heat from the casinos. The NG turbines are really gonna spin.

"There is no national problem with the amount of electric generation.  There are regional challenges with grid connectivity."

ARE YOU SURE?

Outside of weather related outages in specific grids, yes, I'm sure.  What we have currently is poor grid connectivity.  More of a distribution problem than a generation capacity problem.

https://spp.org/

This is an interesting website.  Especially the generation mix.  This is not even from a right leaning magazine.  It's just fact.  Click on generation mix and let me know how well you think things will work if you take out natural gas and coal generation.  

Somehow we have moved from the grid to the generation mix.  I'm not trying to take out natural gas generation.  I'm trying to save it in Louisiana.  Coal will be replaced on an ever increasing timeline. The question is, what will replace it for generating electricity?  In ten years there will be no Louisiana oil industry, only Louisiana gas industry.  We need to be placing the emphasis on how to protect the next forty years of our natural gas related economy: power generation, LNG and chemical products.  The only way that happens is by accepting the limitations that will be unavoidable and getting busy with improving the natural gas value chain from wellhead to end user including CO2 CCUS.

Sorry Skip, I wasn't trying to move from the grid to the generation mix.  You're the one that said that there is "no national problem with the amount of electric generation".  I'm just curious where the power is going to come from if you cut out natural gas and coal.  You said it's a grid problem. 

So is there some great amount of wind and solar power that is being produced that is not making it to the grid?  I assume you're aware that the Southwest Power Pool doesn't reject power produced by wind or solar?  You make it sound as though the power grid is like traffic and there is a traffic jam somewhere.  Can you tell us specifically where that traffic jam is located?

Also, I have read where it takes as much electricity to charge your Tesla as it does to power your home for a day.  If this is true, where will this power come from? 

The power will come from many sources to meet an ever increasing electric demand. Coal has too many problems, it needs to go away on an expedited timeline.  If this had been done under the Obama administration's Clean Power Program, the big winner would have been natural gas.  The plan was neutral on oil and would have sped up the reduction in coal fired generation. Renewables were not then a threat to natural gas from a cost standpoint.

Solar and wind will continue to increase as a percentage of the generation mix but will need to be supported by other less fluctuating generation sources.  Natural gas is the obvious choice but only if it undergoes and extreme rework to eliminate, as much as possible, the methane emission problem.  There are other climate friendly options for Louisiana including CCUS.  Natural gas proponents should be looking over their shoulder at a list of potential new tech generation solutions that are receiving massive capital investments and will no doubt become competition for natural gas in the future.

The projections of future increases in electric demand should be weighed along with the opportunities for reducing demand through more efficient appliances, smart buildings - commercial and residential and alternate forms of lighting.  That's a few examples, there are many more.  As to how to charge that Tesla, the new homes in our immediate future will have solar+storage that will cover some large percentage of EV charging.  They won't pull electricity from the grid for vehicle charging.

Sounds like you got it all figured out!!

I'll bookmark this and refer back to it at some point in the next 5 years when we have rolling blackouts!!

At your pleasure.  I've been posting here for over thirteen years and have a pretty good track record.  If Texas is having rolling blackouts over the next five years, it will be because ERCOT and elected officials have not made any changes to their grid and generating infrastructure.

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