Bright future for EVs, renewable energy in Arizona

Attorney Court Rich said access to electric vehicles (EVs) and their corresponding charging stations is an important investment for Arizona and federal governments to make. (Photo by Pexels)

The future looks bright for electric vehicles in Arizona, according to Court Rich, the co-founder, senior partner, and director of the Renewable Energy and Regulatory Law departments for the Rose Law Group in Scottsdale.

Rich fought legal battles against utility companies to ensure greater access for rooftop solar panels.

In 2019, he represented a solar energy facility in a case that was voted on by the Arizona Corporation Commission, where the ACC voted unanimously for utility companies to buy energy from the solar power companies. He has also represented electric vehicle companies, including Tesla.

Rich said access to electric vehicles (EVs) and their corresponding charging stations is a worthy investment for the state and federal governments. The continued growth in use of electric vehicles, as well as an increasing number of electric vehicle charging stations, will benefit the state similarly to how solar energy did over the past decade, he said.

In the past couple of decades, how much has solar energy grown in Arizona?

The growth has been explosive, and I think there’s two key reasons for that. One is that the price has come down dramatically, and then the second reason is that people like clean energy. So those two things combined over time to just increase its popularity and increase the economic advantage of solar energy.

What kind of resistance did you meet in Arizona to the expansion of solar energy? 

We continue to face the resistance, but the number one source of the resistance is the monopoly utilities in the state. Solar is freedom, it’s choice, it’s competition, it’s controlling your own destiny, and we’re talking about rooftop solar. Every one of those things is bad if you’re a monopoly utility … And any chance you have to provide your own energy diminishes how much energy you need to buy from the utility. That’s bad for their business. I don’t blame them for the positions they’ve taken. But they have been the number one source of trying to stop, trying to slow, frustrate, increase costs, just altogether make it more difficult for Arizonans to go and put solar on their rooftop, put a battery in their garage or power the business with solar.

What is the most recent challenge that you’ve faced in terms of solar energy and renewable energy in general? 

Court Rich

I would say one of the big issues right this minute is the future of batteries. The cost of batteries has come way down. And when you pair solar with batteries, all of a sudden, you can really make a difference and power your home or your business into the evening. This is even more complicated for the utility because that is even less energy they can sell you, and so their newest point of attack is trying to frustrate now the adoption of batteries by their customers. So, we have been working on programs and trying to propose in Arizona that we give people an unfettered ability to go and put batteries in their houses or their businesses and benefit from that. And there’s been a dramatic pushback by the utilities to say, “no, no, no; Let’s stop, let’s wait, let’s think about this.” Because they want to go and build more stuff. And every time I build a battery, using my own money and put it in my garage at home, that’s one less battery they can go build and then charge everybody for and make money on somewhere else.

What is the current state of affairs in your eyes in terms of electric vehicle access and the usage of them in general and Arizona?

I think Arizona is in a prime position for the growth of electric vehicles, and for batteries, for that matter. We have manufacturers and batteries, we have manufacturers of electric vehicles located here in the state, and that’s a great business proposition for the state. So hopefully, all the policies that we implement are supportive of those businesses. And you just see more and more on the road every day. There’s new manufacturers that keep building new brands of cars, and almost all of them are offering multiple electric vehicle options now, and they seem like they’re really popular in Arizona for sure.

What kind of investments should the federal, state, or even local governments make to foster the growth of electric vehicles? 

I’ve had an electric vehicle for eight years now and 95% of the charging you do is at home. You wake up every morning and you’ve got a full battery to do what you’re going to do, and then you go to sleep, and you wake up and you’ve got a full battery again, and you don’t worry about it. But there does need to be public charging opportunities. The key locations that need to be focused on are at work and then also in multifamily apartments or condominium complexes. The city of Phoenix has done some really good things about trying to focus on those areas. The federal government has allocated money to help put charging stations in place along interstates, and the state government has also been part of looking at where to locate those charging stations along interstates to make people more comfortable. While you do most of your charging at home, I think to increase the adoption of electric vehicles it’s really important that people see charging stations out there in public and have opportunities to charge.

What are the economics that factor into where charging stations could go? 

The charging stations really are focused on where the population is and then where the population is going to be and have their car for extended periods of time. We’ve seen shopping malls, movie theaters, grocery stores, those types of places are where you see the charging companies locating most of their charging facilities. You know, Tesla went and built out a whole entire nationwide platform of fast chargers, and they’re the only manufacturer that has done that. But there are a lot of other participants in the charging world that are out there trying to locate their facilities where they’ll have traffic, and it can be economical to do it as more and more EVs get on the road. Then they’ll have more customers and the ability to support more charging stations, the economics will work better. It’s a bit of the chicken or the egg. We want to have the chargers out there so that people feel comfortable adopting EVs, but we need more EVs on the road and make those charging stations economic.

Who owns the charging stations? And what is the difference in price between charging an electric vehicle and filling your car with gas? 

There are several companies out there that are developing electric vehicle charging, like some of the names that you may have heard, like Ego or Blink or ChargePoint; people that have EVs probably (have) seen these or even if you just went to the mall or something, you’ve probably seen those there. The difference in price depends on where you’re charging, and it depends on what the utility electric rates are. In different parts of the country, in different parts of the state even, those rates vary. But generally speaking, it’s well accepted that charging is cheaper than gas.

Do you know why that is? 

If you’re in an Arizona Public Service territory versus Salt River Project service territory versus TDP, or others across the country, they each have their own proof rate structures. That impact shows not only how much it costs to charge your car, but how much it costs to run your air conditioner.

There was a Senate bill (SB1501) introduced by Sen. Frank Carroll, R-Sun City West, that says charges, rates, tolls and rental fees that a public service corporation or electricity supplier receives for any commodity or service would be prohibited from being used to construct or operate an electric vehicle charging station or a commercial charging facility, but may be utilized for “make-ready infrastructure.” What does that mean?  

That would prohibit the APS’s and SRP’s of the world from getting into the electric charging business. And that makes all the sense in the world, because there already is a whole competitive third-party industry that is in that business. And so, it’s impossible for a regulated monopoly to go and compete fairly with, essentially, the private sector. It just doesn’t make sense for them to get into a business where there already are lots of providers. So that bill was to say, “Okay, utilities, you focus on generating electricity, and let’s let the folks that are in the electric vehicle charging business do that and not have this tension, where you have the utilities trying to stop the electric vehicle charging companies from entering their service territory.” It just makes it more expensive for everybody too. So it was, in my view, a pro-competition bill, that should definitely be supported.

What do you think the near and distant future looks like here in Arizona for electric vehicles? 

Electric vehicles taking over is inevitable. They’re more fun, they’re easier to drive. The convenience of waking up every day with a full battery, not having to go to dirty gas stations, and all that kind of stuff is a real positive. With the manufacturers ramping up the different makes and models, the infrastructure increasing, I think consumers are choosing it, and that’s why it’s happening. You know, the other benefit for here in Arizona, particularly in the Valley, that doesn’t get enough credit is I like to go and climb Camelback Mountain, like that’s my favorite thing. You look out, and you see all that smog in the air. A huge percentage of that is coming out of the tailpipes of our cars. For a jurisdiction that’s so reliant on tourism and the outdoors, to clean that up is a great benefit that a lot of us aren’t thinking about that I look forward to for more EVs.

Is there anything that I didn’t touch on with any other questions that I asked that you want to put out there?

I don’t know if this is interesting to you or not, but there’s a lot of, you know, farmers right now that are looking at their challenges with regard to water, and they’re saying they can either plant more cotton or whatever it is next year and use water that’s very scarce, or maybe I can grow solar for the next 20 or so years, while hopefully the drought condition either subsides or new sources of water are found, and then I can go back to farming. A lot of them are making those choices right now, to use their fields to put in solar facilities that they know are just sort of an interim use, that’s beneficial from a water resource standpoint. So, there’s a lot of that happening, which is cool.

So they’re changing over for at least temporarily, just to get in on some of that solar energy. 

Right. I mean, there’s just, there is no more water. So what are you going to do if you’re a farmer, you’ve been farming forever, and water is nowhere to be found?  Here’s a beneficial use that preserves your land because it’s easily taken out later. And if you want to potentially farm in the future, you can have the ability to do that.

Sounds like there’s a lot of parallels between solar energy and electric vehicles. 

I think there could be. Certainly, there’s this tension where utilities want to get into that business more, and the private sector obviously would prefer to have fair competition instead of having to unfairly compete against monopoly utilities. There’s a bit of that.

Court Rich pioneered legal representation of businesses involved in solar power, as well as renewable energy, battery storage and electric vehicle industries.