Ford Motor Co. has announced it expects up to one-fourth of its fleet to be electric vehicles by 2020, only a decade from now. Stories in USA Today and the Detroit Free Press note that of those electrified vehicles, 70% will be hybrids, 20% to 25% plug-in hybrids, the rest pure electrics.
The increased use of electric vehicles, combined with greater wariness about fossil fuels as a result of the Gulf oil spill, could help advance the market for wind and other renewables.
The best options for reducing carbon emissions, air pollution deaths and dependence on fossil fuels are battery electric and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles powered by wind-generated electricity, according to a December 2008 report published in Energy & Environmental Science by Stanford University researcher Mark Z. Jacobson.
