WITHIN a week of each other, two Cabinet ministers have given notice of plans for increased importation of electric vehicles (EVs) to reduce the importation of fossil fuels.

Newly appointed Minister of Transport and Mining Audley Shaw told a meeting of the Standing Finance Committee of Parliament (all 63 elected MPs are members) that the ministry is planning to increase the use of electric vehicles to cut spending on petrol.

According to him, it is part of plans to reduce the operating costs of the 200-300 buses under the management of the Government-owned Jamaica Urban Transit Company (JUTC) plying the Kingston Metropolitan Area which includes Kingston, St Andrew, and sections of St Catherine.

Then on Tuesday, Minister of Finance and the Public Service Dr Nigel Clarke, in his annual budget presentation, noted that Jamaica should, within the next decade, see 100 per cent of its vehicles electrically powered.

“Having such a dependence on oil for our energy needs is a risk to Jamaica’s economic security,” Clarke told members of the House of Representatives as he opened the 2022-2023 Budget Debate.

“We must rid ourselves of this unhealthy dependence on oil,” he added, noting that the prime minister will speak more fulsomely on the subject when he speaks next Thursday.

Clarke noted that, while a huge source of Jamaica’s oil import bill is spent on petrol used by cars, technology currently exists that would allow the country to reduce that dependence and reduce the spending.

“Having more electric vehicles would allow Jamaica to have more renewable energy, as there is synergy between renewable energy’s intermittency problem and electric car’s need for storage,” he stated.

He said that within a decade, motor vehicles in Jamaica need to be 100 per cent electrically powered, with energy from the sun, which would rid the country of the kind of oil price vulnerability that we have today, and consumers would enjoy much more stable prices to operate their cars.

Clarke’s plans is to incentivise the purchase of electric vehicles, includes reducing the import duty on electric motor vehicles from 30 per cent to 10 per cent, for an initial five-year period; and exempting the annual registration fees on battery electric vehicles.

With the Government earning $27 million in duties from the importation of electric vehicles last year, the measure will cost $18 million on the basis of current volumes. However, because duties on motor vehicles are such a huge portion of the Government’s revenues, he said that they will need to limit the number of electric vehicles being imported and which would benefit from this duty incentive to 1,000 per annum.

He also noted that electric vehicles cost one-third that of the cost of petroleum-powered vehicles. If it costs $10,000 to fill a car with petrol, it would cost $3,000 if the car was powered by electricity.

In some countries, the debate is whether, as electric cars become more popular, are they as environmentally friendly as is being advertised? There are detractors who say that greenhouse emissions during the manufacturing process and battery charging have to be taken into consideration.

The number of electric cars, buses, vans and heavy trucks on roads is expected to hit 145 million by 2030, the International Energy Agency predicts. Experts claim that electric vehicles create a lower carbon footprint over the course of their lifetime than do cars and trucks that use traditional, internal combustion engines.

That would appear to be good news, as the world weans itself off fossil fuels which has a harmful effect on the environment.