The Hawaii County Climate Emergency Resolution which passed yesterday made mention of the electrification of transportation! (We requested an amendment to the original to include this and language on adaptation strategies.)

“Other goals of the resolution include the swift completion of a Hawaii Island Climate Action Plan, the expansion of the county’s electric vehicle infrastructure and the support of widespread transitions to climate-smart agriculture.”

We need to aggressively follow-up on the expansion of the charging infrastructure (there are several angles to this) and the decarbonization of our energy grid. We need to ride the wave of the climate crises and push for policies that will ramp up the electrification of our transportation.

We’ve got a while to go. While we’ve reached 10,000 electric vehicles in the state, they represent less than 1% of the passenger vehicles in Hawaii. There are still over 1 million gas cars in the state and they consume over 38 million gallons of gasoline monthly (it was 38.5M gallons in September according to the Hawaii Department of Business, Economic Development & Tourism).

On a positive note, the growth of EVs in the state has been ramping (+30% YoY) while gas car growth has been flat.