I have been following Chace Barber on TikTok since long before he started Edison Motors. I’ve always enjoyed his Canadian-flavored insights into trucking, and I’ve tracked his grassroots foray into building a diesel-electric logging truck with admiration. He provides real insight into what it is like to be a logging truck driver, and has won many hearts and minds with his no-nonsense, pragmatic approach to truck electrification.
Instead of following the likes of Tesla and Nikola into full electrification, he relied on crowdfunding to build a prototype hybrid truck more akin to a diesel electric train than to a Prius. It’s a novel and sensible approach, particularly for the logging truck use-case, and his scrappy, DIY-build has won him a cult following.
So I was startled by Barber’s response during a recent video interview posted to TikTok, when he was asked whether he would ever build fully electric trucks. He began with the standard, reasonable concerns about the challenges posed by truck weight. But then things got weird. To explain his views on the limitations of renewable energy sources, he miscalculated the power generation capacity required to support 5000 fully electric logging trucks.
To be clear, it wasn’t the math that startled me—it was what his attempt at calculation revealed about his understanding of the distinction between power and energy. He doesn’t have one.
Here’s the video clip, plus a transcript of his remarks:
To give you an example, logging trucks in B.C., that’s a niche industry, there’s about 5000 logging trucks that haul logs at 2.5 megawatts of consumption per day. That’s 12.5 gigawatts of power. Site C Dam, has been under construction for the last, oh I dunno 15 years at a cost of $20 billion and that has a 1.1 gigawatt. So a 20 million dollar dam that takes 15 years to build has a 1.1 gigawatt capacity and logging trucks, just logging trucks alone are using 12 and a half gigawatts. You would have to flood an area of land the size of Wales to produce that hydropower.
This seemingly prepared argument is wrong from start to end, and the errors are fundamental. Notice the only units Barber cites are megawatts and gigawatts, which are measures of power. Energy, in contrast, is power over time, and is measured by watt-hours, kilowatt-hours, megawatt-hours, and gigawatt-hours. So 5000 logging trucks that each consume 2.5 megawatt-hours of energy per day would together require 12.5 gigawatt-hours of energy per day. He is correct that Site C dam will generate 1.1 gigawatts of “capacity” if he is referring to peak power. But he clearly confuses this for energy generated over the course of a day and completely misses that, over 24 hours, the dam could thus be expected to generate up to 26 gigawatt-hours (1.1 gigawatts x 24 hours) of energy per day. It will not run at full capacity all the time, so expected average output is closer to half that. Even so, his example dam could quite neatly power all the logging trucks in B.C. His claims about needing to flood an area the size of Wales to power this fleet are complete nonsense.
But it’s this nonsense that gets repeated over and over to reinforce people's biases against electric vehicles. A look through the comments on the video shows the depth of the damage one man’s confident misunderstanding can do. Whether the debate is about the relative environmental damage of EV versus ICE, the real environmental impact of energy that comes from fossil fuel sources, or the potential ‘strain on the grid’ resulting from EV adoption, people who have public credibility but lack understanding as to the technology and terminology are exacerbating an already confused consumer base with misinformation.
I have written before about the state of EV illiteracy, which will have to be addressed through public education on basics like energy and power. Most people are unfamiliar with the terms, units and jargon associated with EVs and hybrids—and there’s no shame in that. There is a lot to learn, and kilowatt-hours are nowhere near as intuitive as gallons. But those holding themselves out as sources of information and as industry insiders should expect to be held to a higher standard and to be called out when they leave folks more confused than when they started.
Of course, thanks to social media, these errors have a way of compounding. Back in September, for example, I saw a tweet from Tesla blogger Sawyer Merritt claiming that the new hybrid F150 has “7.2kWh onboard power” and quoting a presentation by a Ford representative who joked that owners could “help a stranded Tesla driver power up their car on the side of the road.” This claim was strange on its face, not just because a kWh is a measure of energy, not power, but also because that would be quite a large battery for any non plug-in hybrid. After the most cursory research, I confirmed that Merritt was wrong; the F-150 hybrid has a 1.5kWh battery and can provide 7.2kW of power continuously. I commented in his tweet thread and went on with my day.
About an hour later, however, Merritt doubled down, tweeting the same incorrect unit but with a link to a video of the presentation. Watching this, I realized that the error originated with Ford. I was stunned to see none other than John Emmert, the General Manager of North American Trucks for Ford, in a presentation at the Detroit Auto Show, repeatedly use kWh instead of kW when referring to the power that the truck battery was capable of providing. Fortunately the deck projected behind him used the correct units, but it wasn’t hard to understand the ensuing Twitter confusion.
In a social media-powered world, one person’s confusion becomes the evidence that thousands use to inform their decisions or reinforce their biases. If consumers are to understand this new world of vehicles, we need the supposed experts in the industry—the people engineering, building and selling these vehicles—to get the most basic concepts right. At the very least, they shouldn’t be staking out positions and drawing false conclusions based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how stuff works.