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Dutch government is discussing the possibility to only allow electric vehicle sales starting in 2025

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After India evaluating a scheme for all its fleet to be electric by 2030, now we learn that the Dutch government is discussing the possibility to ban gas-powered car sales and only allow electric vehicle sales starting in 2025.

Although the parliament is considering the possibility to implement such a drastic law, the house is divided and the liberal coalition in power does not see the rule being implemented any time soon.

NLTimes wrote yesterday:

“Coalition partner VVD finds the motion overambitious and unrealistic. VVD Minister Henk Kamp of Economic Affairs thinks that at most 15 percent of all sold cars can be completely electric in 2025. Party leader Halbe Zijlstra thinks the plan contradicts the Energy Agreement. “It seems crazy to get this plan to work. I think we’ll have to withdraw from the Energy Agreement”, he said.”

Socialist leader Diederik Samsom disagrees and sees the plan as “completely feasible”. Samsom’s party doesn’t have a majority in the Dutch parliament, but at least they are discussing an EV plan and it could possibly become an election issue.

Last year, plug-in vehicles in the Netherlands had about a 10% market share. There are almost 5,000 Tesla Model S owners in the country.

Featured Image: Fastned’s fast-charging station in the Netherlands

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Comments

  1. freedomev - 8 years ago

    Only EV cars by 2025 is feasible and in fact will mostly happen whether they do anything or not. Why is by then lithium will be $50/kwhr, and weigh 8 lbs/kwhr makes it stupid economically to buy so much more costly gas cars, especially their cost to run.
    I doubt business will buy other than EV in just 6 -7 yrs as their bean counters won’t let them.
    And that doesn’t include so many other battery types ready then like various metal/air, lithium sulfur, etc giving 1k mile range with a 50lb replaceable battery that only costs 1.5x’s the retail electric rate/kwhr.
    These will not just be big truck, EV range extenders but also power homes, etc on excess clean power they are made with.

  2. Jens - 8 years ago

    Though I’m very in favor of electric cars, I actually don’t think, forbidding ICE sales is a wise idea. It will only make the resistance of petrolheads stronger. People don’t like to be pushed.
    I’m very confident, that a majority of people don’t give a shit, how the drivetrain is powered. They need a car that they trust to fulfill their everyday needs. And once EVs get more common with „normal people“, and everybody knows someone who is driving a Tesla 3, Chevy Bolt or something like it, the change will happen very fast all on its own. Exponential growth looks like no growth at all for a very long time – until it shoots through the roof over night. 🙂

  3. BEP - 8 years ago

    Bad idea. First, this is too radical and only brings hate towards electric mobility. Second, in 2025 there will be no need for this, with many compelling EVs on the market.

  4. Martin H - 8 years ago

    Dutchie here. There is no discussion any more. This BS plan, coming from a party in the margins is no way possible. To produce the energy needed, we need to double the number of power plants in 10 years… I don’t see why this is being discussed as there is hardly any discussion about this in the Netherlands.

    • František Kubiš Jr. - 8 years ago

      doubling the number of power plants just to power EVs is biggest bullshit ever!! Do the math first:
      num_of_cars * avg_km_driven_per_year * avg_consumption_per_km = energy_consumed_in_TWh
      vs
      energy_consumed_in_country

      I don’t know the exact numbers for Netherlands, but in Czech Republic, where I live it would take about ~8TWh which is less energy than 2/3 of 1 nuclear power plant here. Whole Czech Republic consumes around 60TWh of electricity in one year.

      • Tom - 8 years ago

        It’s a matter of capacity, not supply. The power generated over the year may be enough to provide adequate energy for all of the miles driven by all the cars…if they all charge sequentially, one after another, but unfortunately things don’t work that way.

        If a car is drawing kW in the range of what a house consumes, or several times that for a fast charger and if you have lots of them doing it at the same time, you’re going to have blackouts. Frequently. There have been studies that have looked at this in the US and they found that while it might not require (m)any new power plants to put something like 30% of the entire US fleet of automobiles on hybrid electric power, if they were fully electric vehicles – as opposed to 15-20kWh battery hybrid vehicles, that only charged at night – it might require potentially dozens of new power stations to be built. With a full rollout of purely electric with fast charge capabilities, that number jumps to the hundreds.
        The point is that we build power stations to just about meet *power* demands, not energy demands – we’re hugely wasteful with energy. But if there’s any kind of significant increase in power usage, especially if in the day, then the grid will be overwhelmed quicker than you think.

      • Nathanael - 8 years ago

        Tom, don’t worry about it — you haven’t plotted the rise of solar power, have you? There’ll be plenty of power. The total electric usage is dropping, too.

        As for peak electrical load occuring after dark, that’s what the batteries are for. This isn’t going to be hard.

  5. Tom - 8 years ago

    Socialists always like to get things done with a stick, rather than a carrot. Rather than incentivise people to do good things, they ban “bad” things. Rather then encourage good behaviour, they outlaw “bad” behaviour.

    The only wrinkle being that not everyone agrees on what is good and bad.

    I applaud the effort of trying to increase electric car uptake, but it should not be done by banning gas cars – that’s going to put homes and livelihoods on the line for a lot of people who might work in the non-electric auto industry.

    Have they taken into account the effect on the power grid as well? Would it be able to meet the demands of an enormous uptake of electric cars, especially if fast charging because standard in the next few years?

    • Jens - 8 years ago

      There have always jobs been destroyed by new industries or technologies. Why should petrol/ICE related Jobs be protected from Tesla, but not Independent bookstores from Amazon and ebooks?
      But als I Said erlier, I don’t consider a ban on ICEs a good Idea. For diferent reasons though.

      As for the power Problem: this might be one reason for Tesla to invest heavily in Energy storage. Elon is thinking years, if not decades ahead. I’m shure, he and his companies are looking into peak demand

    • Nathanael - 8 years ago

      It’s good to get the idea out there. Dumping pollution into the air in cities is going to become unacceptable after a while. Banning gasmobiles today would make no sense, but things are going to be so different in 2025; maybe 2030 would be better. Electric car production will be in the several millions, *conservatively*; solar panels will be so cheap that they’ll be absolutely booming; batteries will be mainstream…

  6. Tint Depot (@tintdepot) - 8 years ago

    Great idea!

  7. Nathanael - 8 years ago

    I actually suspect they might pass this law… not this year, but in a future year. By 2020 there will be so many electric cars sold that it’s going to seem archaic to have a pollution-spewer driving through town.

    It’ll happen faster than you think! London is talking about banning combustion cars from downtown, and if they do that successfully, it’ll be seen as a role model for cleaning up urban smog.

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