[DungeonMaster]

Just so everyone knows, what this article leaves out is that the vast majority of electric cars are sold not in the coal-heavy areas discussed in this article, but in areas where coal makes up a much smaller portion of electricity generation. For example, 40% of electric cars sold in the United States are sold in California alone, and coal only makes up 8% of their electricity generation.

Thanks, that's another aspect but I dared not speak of renewable energy.

[RayChuang88]

By the way, the lack of cheaply-available coal fields in the western USA at the time was the reason why during the steam locomotive era, the railroads in California--Southern Pacific and Santa Fe primarily--could not use coal as fuel because it would have been too expensive to ship in the coal (remember, this is long, long before coal was discovered in Wyoming's Powder River Basin). Instead, the discovery of crude oil in California allowed steam locomotives to use Bunker C fuel instead right up until the end of the steam age in the 1950's.

That very lack of coal early in the 20th Century was why California aggressively pursued hydroelectric power and natural gas for electric power plants.