Our View: The age of the all-electric Valley is upon us

If we finally are to cleanse our Valley air and make this a more healthy place to live, we must get belching cars off the streets and start adding electric cars and plug-in hybrids to our garages.

We wish the path to ending premature deaths and our high asthma rates weren’t so narrow. But the reality is that a combination of the Valley’s bowl shape and warm, sunny weather are the perfect recipe for forming ozone.

What is ozone and why is it bad for us?

It is a corrosive gas that irritates lungs and triggers breathing problems, asthma and heart ailments. There’s no mystery about why so many more kids in our valley suffer with asthma than do kids in other parts of the nation.

The Environmental Protection Agency says that a new tougher ozone standard introduced this year will prevent more than 200 premature deaths in 2025, when most of the nation will have complied with the stricter rule.

But our ozone problem is so bad the EPA has given the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Quality Control District until 2037 to meet the higher standard.

Reducing our ozone to the new mark of 70 parts per billion – down from 75 ppb, a standard we have yet to achieve – will require us to use cars, trucks, buses, tractors and trains that run on electricity.

“We will have to eliminate emissions associated with fossil-fuel combustion,” said Seyed Sadredin, executive director of the Valley air district.

So, the age of the all-electric Valley is upon us.

Change is never easy, but change we must. It helps that the Valley air district has incentive programs designed to help. These are in addition to state and federal incentives.

For example, the district’s “Drive Clean!” program can give an additional $3,000 for the purchase or lease of an all-electric vehicle (with lower amounts for plug-in hybrids). Combined with state and federal rebates, this allows someone interested in going electric to walk into a new-car showroom with $13,000 in incentives. That’s a pretty good head start in purchasing a $35,000 vehicle.

A person in a low-income household currently driving an old beater (aka, a gross-polluting vehicle), can qualify for $22,500 in district, state and federal assistance for buying or leasing an electric car. And once you’ve made the purchase, it really starts to pay off as you pay far, far less to fuel it.

The district determines eligibility for its $9,500 incentive to take gross polluters owned by low-income households off the road at its Tune In Tune Up events.

Employers, too, have an important role to play. The air district provides up to $50,000 a year to businesses and public agencies that invest in charging stations for electric vehicles. There is a caveat: The charging station must be available for public use at least part of the time. That’s why you might have noticed the station in the Vintage Faire Mall parking lot.

Our region has a reputation for being skeptical of new technologies. We typically don’t jump on the bandwagon until the early adopters have worked out the bugs.

This time we need to get aboard early.

All of us will benefit from cleaner air, but our children, the elderly and those suffering from heart and lung ailments stand to gain the most, says EPA administrator Gina McCarthy.

And for those who say we can’t afford to go electric, we say, do the math. Be sure to include all the incentives – as well as the staggering costs of missed school days, employee absences, emergency room visits, extended hospital stays and premature deaths.

This story was originally published December 31, 2015 at 12:56 PM with the headline "Our View: The age of the all-electric Valley is upon us."