Priorities
Deployment Communities
The central policy recommendation of the Electrification Coalition is a competitive process in which specific geographic areas would vie to be selected as electrification deployment communities.
Selected communities would be eligible for temporary, amplified incentives designed to ensure that each of the elements of an electrified transportation system is deployed simultaneously and at scale, thereby providing a crucial first step toward moving electrification beyond a niche product into a dominant, compelling, and ubiquitous concept.
Deployment communities would include all of the elements necessary for the successful market adoption of grid-enabled vehicles. These electrified cities and regions will:
- Move the concept beyond early adopters
- Drive economies of scale in vehicle manufacturing
- Facilitate learning by doing
The deployment community plan offers multiple advantages. It will reward the best in American ingenuity as communities compete to offer the most fertile ground for this new and exciting technology. It will be fiscally responsible by concentrating carefully targeted and temporary incentives in the winning communities. At the same time, it will encourage manufacture and deployment at scale, which is crucial to bringing down costs and discovering the best business models, while also creating jobs across the country.
Critically, deployment communities will help avoid the ‘hybrid trap.’ Despite having debuted more than 10 years ago, the 1.6 million hybrid vehicles now on America’s roads account for less than 1 percent of the total 250 million cars and SUVs. From an energy security perspective, that number is insignificant. Deployment communities will guarantee that electric vehicles are not relegated to a niche product owned and operated solely by environmentalists and technological enthusiasts.
By deploying vehicles at scale in select communities, deployment communities offer a responsible, effective way to finally do what we have talked about doing for decades: ending our dangerous dependence on petroleum.