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THE ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2021
State behind on electric goals
By TED SICKINGER
The Oregonian
David Bernal, a 36-year-old software engi-
neer from southeast Portland, went all elec-
tric last summer, plunking down $50,000 on a
Tesla Model 3 extended range electric car and
another $2,000 on a home charging set up.
His purchase was primarily driven by guilt
about all his driving and its impact on climate
change — enough remorse to overcome the
high upfront costs and his anxiety about taking
long trips and potentially running out of juice.
He’s been pleasantly surprised. Thanks to
the car’s 300-mile range and Tesla’s propri-
etary supercharger network, he’s comfortable
with road trips like the one he took to Northern
California this summer to see the redwoods.
“A lot of people I talk to think an EV
wouldn’t actually work for them, and for most
people it’s actually more practical than they
realize,” he said of electric vehicles.
If the aggressive greenhouse gas reduc-
tion goals laid out by Gov. Kate Brown and
state lawmakers are to become anything more
than political talking points, Oregon needs a
lot more people thinking like Bernal, a rapid
and radical shift in how people and goods
move around the state, and a cultural revolu-
tion in how lawmakers and state bureaucrats
approach the problem.
Burning fossil fuels for transportation
— cars, trucks, buses, planes and trains —
accounts for nearly 40% of the state’s carbon
emissions, its largest single share. Apart from
a blip during the great recession, they have
remained level or increased for the last decade.
In short, state data shows a growing gap
between its aggressive goals and reality. In the
transportation sector, Oregon is not on track
to reduce emissions to 45% below 1990 lev-
els by 2035 and 80% below by 2050. Not even
close.
A newly developed Climate Action Plan
from the Oregon Department of Transporta-
tion states that one of the most eff ective ways
to reduce transportation emissions will be tran-
sitioning to zero emission vehicles, including
battery electric, plug-in hybrids and hydrogen
powered vehicles. It pledges to be a leader in
that eff ort.
Advocates put it more bluntly.
“You either electrify the fl eet or you don’t
meet your climate goals,” said Angus Duncan,
the former chair of Oregon’s Global Warming
Commission.
But the state already lags well behind the
steep adoption curve for the number of zero
emission vehicles that ODOT forecasts will be
necessary to meet its emission reduction goals.
Access to Oregon’s public network of electric
chargers is inequitable and anemic, well short
of what studies suggest will be necessary to
support even moderate levels of electrifi cation
and quell drivers’ range anxiety.
And perhaps most tellingly, state govern-
ment is unlikely to keep pace with goals to
electrify its own fl eet of vehicles — despite
having control over what to purchase and
when.
Meanwhile, climate activists say the state
is all but ignoring one of the biggest oppor-
tunities to transform urban transportation and
reduce resulting emissions: electric bikes.
“There’s no longer a debate about whether
e-bikes are transformational,” said Jonathan
Maus, the editor of Bike Portland, an online
biking news outlet. “It’s already here. It’s a
proven concept. And it’s cheap.”
Yet in ODOT’s studies of vehicle electri-
fi cation and carbon reduction, he said, “they
totally failed to embrace bicycling. They
didn’t even respect it enough to take it seri-
ously. They slow walk this stuff while promot-
ing the things they really care about.
“It’s all car, car, car, car, car car.”
Brown’s offi ce declined to answer spe-
cifi c questions about Oregon’s lack of prog-
ress in curbing transportation emissions, and
what, if any, accountability measures should
be pursued.
But Liz Merah, a spokesperson for the
governor, wrote in an email that “state agen-
cies are making good progress on the climate
action plans” submitted to the offi ce last year.
“We know there is still more work to do
to meet our climate goals, and that climate
change is a crisis that must be tackled with
Richard Read/The Oregonian
Oregon already lags well behind the steep adoption curve for the number of zero-emission vehicles that the Oregon Department of
Transportation forecasts will be necessary to meet its emission reduction goals.
‘A LOT OF PEOPLE I TALK TO THINK AN EV
WOULDN’T ACTUALLY WORK FOR THEM, AND
FOR MOST PEOPLE IT’S ACTUALLY MORE
PRACTICAL THAN THEY REALIZE.’
David Bernal | a 36-year-old software engineer from southeast Portland, went all electric last summer, plunking
down $50,000 on a Tesla Model 3 extended range electric car and another $2,000 on a home charging set up
continued urgency,” she wrote.
Falling behind
ODOT’s Statewide Transportation Strat-
egy, issued in March 2013, acknowledged the
important role electrifi cation would play in
reducing greenhouse emissions. But its short-
term implementation plan for that strategy,
issued the following year, included mostly
vague strategies like developing commu-
nications materials highlighting the bene-
fi ts of electric vehicles, promoting EV tour-
ism opportunities in Oregon and participating
in the West Coast Green Highway Initiative
to install charging stations up and down the
Interstate 5 corridor. It included no concrete
goals or outcomes.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, a 2018 monitoring
report acknowledged that little progress had
been made, and that if current trends contin-
ued, the state’s carbon emissions from trans-
portation would be higher in 2050, not lower
— three times higher than the level targeted
by the state.
Senate Bill 1044, passed by the Legisla-
ture in 2019, did set concrete goals for zero
emission vehicles in the state: 50,000 in 2020,
increasing to 250,000 in 2025, and the equiv-
alent of 1.1 million in 2030 and 2.5 million by
2035. But the state is not on a path to achieve
them either.
At the end of 2020, Oregon had just 32,000
registered zero emission vehicles, 35% short
of its goal, according to the Oregon Depart-
ment of Energy. And getting to the 2025 goal,
it noted in a report issued earlier this year,
would require more than a tenfold increase in
the 4% market share of new vehicles that are
electric.
Amanda Pietz, the administrator of
ODOT’s policy, data and analysis division and
former director of its Climate Offi ce, suggests
the reason the state isn’t hitting its electrifi ca-
tion goals or seeing emissions decline is that
gas has been cheap over the last decade, peo-
ple have been holding onto their vehicles lon-
ger, and as the economy has recovered, they’re
driving more. Meanwhile, electric cars have
not yet reached price parity with those burn-
ing fossil fuels.
There is reason for optimism, she says.
New and more effi cient models of electric
cars and trucks are arriving each year. Prices
are dropping. The state has increased incen-
tives and the feds may do the same.
ODOT’s Climate Action Plan, issued in
July, adopted a more modest electrifi cation
goal than the Legislature’s – to triple the num-
ber of electric vehicles on Oregon roads by
2023, to about 120,000. But its own projec-
tions forecast that won’t happen until the end
of 2027 — meaning Oregon would also badly
miss the Legislature’s goal for 2025.
Critics say the electrifi cation goals
described in the Climate Action Plan are lack-
luster, and the agency needs to explicitly iden-
tify the combination of federal and state strat-
egies that can plausibly achieve the state’s
greenhouse gas reduction goals.
From the standpoint of reaching the state’s
emission goals, it’s important to get the elec-
tric transition going soon. ODOT data indi-
cates that most vehicles stay in statewide reg-
istrations for 15 years.
“That means that someone who buys a
non-EV today may not reach a point to pur-
chase another vehicle until 2036,” said Jes-
sica Reichers, technology and policy manager
at the Oregon Department of Energy. “And
that’s the average time, so some people will
keep their cars even longer.”
As it stands, ODOT is not forecasting any
decline in motor fuel sales between now and
2029. That implies no reduction in related
emissions. And if that turns out to be the case,
transportation emissions at the beginning of
2030 would be 75% higher than the linear
glidepath to hit the state’s carbon reduction
goal for 2035, according to Portland econo-
mist Joe Cortright.
Daniel Porter, ODOT’s chief economist,
says the agency’s revenue and electric vehicle
forecasts represent the agency’s most likely
scenario. They are not based on what the
agency wants to see happen, or on the gover-
nor’s executive order, he said, but purely on
consumer patterns and historical data.
While state law and the governor’s order
speak to the targets, “there’s nothing in it that
says we have to meet that goal” he said. “It
says we want to meet that goal, but where’s
the stick to make that happen?”
There’s no stick. Few of the state’s carbon
reduction policies passed to date are enforce-
able. The Legislature did provide a carrot,
increasing incentives for purchases of new
and used electric vehicles by low- and moder-
ate-income households.
Meanwhile, the state looks like it will fall
well short of a goal to electrify its own vehicle
fl eet used by government employees.
To spur electrifi cation, legislators passed
a bill in 2019 requiring state agencies to
increase their zero-emission vehicle procure-
ment to 25% of all light duty vehicle pur-
chases and leases by 2025. Earlier this year,
lawmakers passed House Bill 2027, increas-
ing the requirement to 100% by 2025 to the
extent they are available and capable of meet-
ing the agency’s specifi c needs.
The state fl eet has averaged about 7,200
light-duty vehicles over the last fi ve years. At
present there are just 42 zero emission vehi-
cles in its light-duty fl eet, and the Department
of Administrative Services expects an addi-
tional 100 to 150 deployed by July 2023, for a
total of less than 3% of the fl eet. At that pace,
it won’t come close to the 100% procurement
goal, and it would take decades to replace the
state fl eet with electric vehicles.
There are obvious reasons. Reichers says
pickups make up about a third of the state
fl eet. Some are used in remote areas that may
require more range than electric vehicles avail-
able through 2025 may be able to provide.
Then there’s the cost. A 2020 report by
the agency concluded that the biggest barri-
ers were the cost and eff ort to install charging
stations at state facilities, the people needed to
manage the program, and the incrementally
higher costs of the cars themselves.
The study said that it if the state were able
to electrify the entire fl eet right now — it can’t
— the incremental cost of the vehicles and
installing the charging infrastructure would
be $200 million more than what it would pay
to replace the fl eet with internal combustion
engine vehicles.
“The eff ort to electrify the state fl eet will
be spread out over a decade or two and we can
expect to see vehicle and charging infrastruc-
ture costs to decrease over time,” the report
said. “However, the estimate above is a good
See Electric, Page B3
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