Why Would You Power A Clean Electric Car With Dirty Energy? Buying a Tesla might lead to greener choices elsewhere

NEW YORK — It’s one thing to get peo­ple to care about the price of ener­gy. It’s quite anoth­er chal­lenge to get them to care about the source of ener­gy and its envi­ron­men­tal impact.

But buy­ing an elec­tric car — pre­sum­ably, in part, to reduce one’s car­bon foot­print — may push peo­ple to think about where the elec­tric­i­ty to pow­er that vehi­cle comes from, accord­ing to one ear­ly investor in Tes­la Motors.

“The elec­tric vehi­cle is like a Tro­jan horse for ener­gy lit­er­a­cy,” Nan­cy Pfund, man­ag­ing part­ner at the ven­ture cap­i­tal firm DBL Part­ners, said dur­ing a pan­el dis­cus­sion at the Bloomberg New Ener­gy Finance Sum­mit in Man­hat­tan on Mon­day morning.

Pfund said she noticed the pos­si­ble link­age a decade ago, when DBL first invest­ed in Tes­la, which sells lux­u­ry elec­tric cars, and its sis­ter com­pa­ny, SolarCi­ty, which mar­kets solar pow­er sys­tems. Both are chaired by bil­lion­aire Elon Musk.

“In the ear­ly days of Tes­la, ear­ly adopters would buy the Road­ster or the Mod­el S, and weeks lat­er we’d see an uptick in solar adopters,” she told The Huff­in­g­ton Post in an inter­view. “They’re real­ly exam­ples of the con­nec­tion between trans­porta­tion and the green elec­tri­cal grid.”

The idea is that no one wants to go green­er by buy­ing a bat­tery-pow­ered elec­tric vehi­cle only to charge it with elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­at­ed from burn­ing coal or gas.

To read the full arti­cle, vis­it The Huff­in­g­ton Post.