Letter: EV cars alternative

To paraphrase Kelly Bullis’s July 27 opinion, if everybody had an EV and we all charged on today’s grid, the “huge gorilla in the room” wins.

Well, currently everybody who has an EV is plugging in and the grid today is fine. Yes, the grid needs to grow substantially to support when everyone has an EV.

Grid improvements have begun. Citizens Climate Lobby is lobbying for the bipartisan Energy Permitting Act of 2024. It will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions by expeditiously expanding the electricity transmission infrastructure to accommodate all the renewable energy that will be coming online.

Ask Sens. Cortez Masto and Rosen to support this bill if it comes up for a vote. Why haven’t automakers gone with hydrogen? EVs are viable, available, in demand, there’s money to be made, and modifying the infrastructure for EVs is more easily done than modifying for hydrogen.

The reason many, maybe most, EV vehicle owners have chosen EVs is for a cleaner environment. While burning hydrogen is very clean, since the exhaust is water, how the hydrogen is produced is not so clean unless clean energy is used.

A clean hydrogen production and distribution infrastructure is nonexistent and is a much bigger gorilla! Kelly, how do we wake up the fossil fuel industry to direct its energy toward a clean product? That’s a tough one.

I think the EV movement is a first step. It’s waking up the fossil fuel industry. There are alternatives to burning fossil fuels!

Rob Bastien

Carson City