Canada has backed itself into a corner.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government has set two hard deadlines for zero-emission vehicles.
It's declared that every single sedan and light truck sold in the country must be zero-emission by 2035, and every vehicle heavier than that has to be emission-free by 2040.
Furthermore, to facilitate that transition, the government is pouring billions of dollars into a new EV battery plant in Ontario.
There's just one problem...
Canada doesn't produce enough electricity to support a country full of EVs.
As Adithya Legala, a Ph.D. student with the Fuel Cell and Green Energy Lab at the University of Waterloo, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation:
Our household power consumption is somewhere around 20 to 30 kilowatt [hours] in a day, and an electric vehicle's average battery size is between 60 to 90 kilowatt hours, so essentially tripling overnight the entire power demand.
And even that is a conservative estimate, because it presumes everyone would own a small EV rather than a large electric truck, which would complicate matters further.
For example, GM's electric Hummer has a 212-kWh pack. That's over three times the size of the Chevrolet Bolt EV's battery and double the size of the battery pack in the Chevrolet Blazer EV.
Now, I don't live in Canada, but given what I know about the climate, you'd probably want a truck with four-wheel drive up there.
So it's hard to imagine that the country's entire driving population would be satisfied with a small sedan.
That means bigger batteries and a quadrupling or quintupling of the power demand if we take Legala at his word.
Now let's crunch some numbers to drive this point home.