Military Efficiency? Biden’s Electric Vehicle Push Adds Hours to Routine Marine Trip
by Collin Anderson July 10, 2023 in Opinion
At a small base in southwest Georgia, Marines are regularly tasked with making the roughly nine-hour drive to a much larger site: Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. The trip is routine enough, spanning roughly 520 miles of mostly highway driving. A new Ford F-150 can even complete it on just one tank of gas.
Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany, however, is no ordinary military site. It’s the U.S. military‘s greenest base, having achieved carbon neutrality through solar panels and other alternative sources. As part of its push to go green, the base is electrifying much of its vehicle fleet, including through a brand-new F-150 Lightning, Ford’s electric pickup. Marines stationed at the base aren’t totally sold on the effort, however, with some expressing concern that if they make the back-and-forth journey to Camp Lejeune in an electric vehicle, they’ll face charging complications that could turn a routine trip into a logistical nightmare.
That anxiety is justified, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis, which used a popular electric vehicle trip planning service to chart the charging stops required when making the drive in the base’s electric truck. These stops make each leg of the trip at least three hours longer—and that’s assuming the public charging stations littered between the Albany base and Camp Lejeune actually work. They often don’t. In an electric truck, the roughly 9-hour trip balloons to at least 12 hours, if not considerably longer.
The inefficiencies associated with electric vehicle charging—particularly during long road trips—have not stopped the Biden administration from moving forward with plans to require the U.S. military to adopt an all-electric vehicle fleet by 2030. President Joe Biden last year said his administration is “spending billions of dollars” to “start the process where every vehicle in the United States military, every vehicle, is going to be climate-friendly. Every vehicle—I mean it.” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm endorsed this “process” in April, saying during a Senate hearing that she supports the military‘s adoption of an “EV fleet.”
https://thelibertyloft.com/2023/07/10/military-efficiency-bidens-electric-vehicle-push-adds-hours-to-routine-marine-trip/
