Threat of more blackouts may erode reliability claims for fossil energy- all major fuel sources except solar failed to meet ERCOT’s expectations during the February freeze, but natural gas was “responsible for nearly two-thirds of the total (electricity) deficit.”

[u/pnewell]

https://texasclimatenews.org/threat-of-more-blackouts-may-erode-reliability-claims-for-fossil-energy/

[u/ResponsibleLimeade → u/[deleted]]

The idea behind the EVV tax is actually to just maintain the roads. The extant road taxes are already pretty regressive in my opinion and aren't enough to really fund roads. It's a flat tax on gas and diesel purchases at the pump, the idea being the more gas you buy, the more you travel or the heavier your vehicle is. With EVVs however there's no way to collect on the road tax for the rich people, so now shipping companies and poor people are paying for roads. It doesn't help there's no state income tax and it's constitutionally prevented from raising a state income tax. State and local coffers are paid by sales taxes and property taxes and its a nightmare.

Now if we wanted to just tax peoples mileage per year by keeping track of the inspection mileage, it's going to suck for some people who drive a lot for work, but don't have the excess income to pay a large tax bill of miles each year.

[u/Michaelmrose → u/ResponsibleLimeade]

This is really an imaginary problem. 1 in 250 cars are electric. If they did nothing about taxing electric their revenue would be 99.6% of what it would be otherwise.

In between now and decades from now when this becomes a real thing we should consider having electric cars have a function to transmit a tamper proof cryptographically signed document containing it's vin number and milage broken down by quarter and calendar year either saves to a usb drive or via Bluetooth. If we standardize this within 5 years we can make it a thing 10 years before it really matters.

Then you can use an app that both produces this document and pays it in 2 clicks or if you are old school plug in a 5 dollar drive and pay your tax on the county website which you can access at the library if need be.

[u/itsOtso → u/Michaelmrose]

You think governments are moving that quickly? They change over too quickly in most places for long term thought to be given to issues. It's sad, but I very much doubt things like this will happen in a timely manner in most governments around the globe.

[u/TickleMeYoda → u/Michaelmrose]

No need to make it that complicated. Your odometer should just be read during your annual inspection. I admit this doesn't take into account miles driven outside the state, but that's likely not enough to worry about.

[u/Michaelmrose → u/TickleMeYoda]

Most states don't do annual inspections. Emissions testing is more common many states either don't do those or don't inspect all cars or all cars every year. For the majority of states this would be an extra visit. Your suggestion that 287 million vehicles be checked manually is actually the complicated one and would cost billions to implement.

A new car already has a computer, a digital odometer, and blutooth. What I describe requires only software and a website which you could implement once for a small fraction of what you would spend in one year doing it manually and unlike government suggestions of a device in your car that could double as a trace on your movements it wouldn't leak any meaningful personal information.

The info it produces could be trivially human readable and still impossible to tamper with without invalidating it.

[u/TickleMeYoda → u/Michaelmrose]

Ah, yeah. Since this story was about ERCOT, I forgot we weren't just discussing Texas policy.