Environmental Protection: Electric Cars Are Cutting Into Oil Demand

We’ve heard for years that, if enough people adopted electric vehicles, we’d see demand for oil start to go down. Well, we seem to be reaching that turning point. And while private electric vehicle use is helping (thanks to all those people driving Leafs and Teslas), a lot of the current bites being taken out of oil demand is coming from the commercial sector. Particularly from nation’s like China, which is replacing their fleets of gas-powered buses with electric models in order to save money on Environmental Protection.

Electric Has Gotten Cheaper

As Forbes points out, lots of governments are investing in electric vehicles because they’ve gotten cheap enough to make that switch a bargain. Buses, in particular, are an attractive option because even the most expensive chargers coupled with the biggest batteries is just as cheap as running a diesel bus. If you shrink the size of the batteries (since most buses don’t need that amount of power on-board), or you use a less-expensive charger, then savings become immediately apparent.

Which is why every five weeks, China is currently adding a number of buses equal to London’s entire fleet.

We’re already starting to see the effects of that embrace of electricity. Demand is going down far faster than it has in the past, and that’s just from one sector. While you consider the other fleets that are eyeing the switch to electric vehicles (semi-trucks, delivery vehicles, postal vehicles, etc.), it looks pretty likely that the days of fossil fuel dominance are limited. Especially since it tends to be true that the more demand there is for a technology, the faster the price of that technology comes down. With the current demand for electric vehicles, we could be seeing the start of a surge that gets more people, companies, and governments than ever before on-board the electric revolution.