Last week, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) passed a plan that requires all new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the state to be electric vehicles or plug-in electric hybrids by 2035.
Five days later, California is telling people not to charge their electric vehicles due to a heat wave that is hitting the state over the next several days.
I’m left scratching my head wondering what in the world is going on. California cannot even get their power grid under control, and yet they want to ban all new sales of gas-powered cars and light trucks within the state in the next thirteen years. This seems like a huge stretch. Possible? Anything is possible. Likely? I highly doubt it.
California averages around 2 million new car sales a year according to the California New Car Dealers Association (CNCDA). In 2017 and 2018, California sold over 2 million new cars. With Covid hitting, California new car sales dropped slightly by 2020 down to 1.6 million, however went up to 1.8 million in 2021. According to the CNCDA, California is expected to either exceed 2 million new car sales by the end of 2022 or come extremely close to that mark. According to Wikipedia, as of December 2021, cumulative plug-in car registrations in the state since 2010 totaled 1.072 million units. So, while California sells an average of 2 million new cars per year, it’s taken them 11 years to sell just 1 million electric cars, some of which are undoubtedly hybrids.
California sells more EV’s than any other state in the union. According to Inside EV’s, plug-in vehicle registrations in 2021 increased by about 79% year-over-year to 237,618, which is 12.8% of the total market. There’s no doubt that Californians are adapting to electric vehicles. The issue here is that CARB’s plan to make all new car and light truck sales fully electric by 2035 puts sales of EV’s into overdrive at a rate that I’m not so sure their grid can keep up. The sales of EV’s going into 2035 is going to come in phases.
35% percent of new cars and light trucks sold in the state must be zero-emission, plug-in hybrid or hydrogen-powered vehicles by the year 2026. The sales of these vehicles will increase to 68% by the year 2030 and will end up at 100% by the year 2035. To put that into perspective, if California stays at selling 2 million cars per year through 2035, that means by 2026 they must be selling 700,000 EV’s or hybrids per year, 1.36 million by 2030, and a full 2 million by 2035. In order to be able to do this, California is going to have to go through a huge overhaul in their electrical infrastructure. Not only that, but a ton of electrical stations are going to have to be put all over the state to accommodate for those who travel.
According to The Sacramento Bee, there’s plenty of concern from experts concerning such a fast transition into a full EV market within the next decade. Among them: that electric cars will be too expensive, charging stations won’t be plentiful, and an all-electric fleet will put additional pressure on the state’s fragile power grid. According to the article, the Western States Petroleum Association said, “electrification of the transportation sector will increase demand by around 300,000 gigawatt-hours statewide,” which would amount to doubling electricity demands.
However, officials from the California Energy Commission are pushing back against this idea saying that, charging electric vehicles will “add only a small amount of demand onto the grid” and they believe that electricity demand is forecasted to make up less than 3% of energy use during peak hours in 2030. I just find that simply ironic since they are telling people right now to not charge their electric vehicles because of demands, but here in 8 years everything is going to be fine and will make up only about 3% of the total energy use. Can California revamp their electrical infrastructure that fast? The demand is only going to increase year after year as more people buy EV’s. At some point, every household in California will have at least 1 EV. Some may have 2. Some people with kids may have more. Millions upon millions of EV’s charging at the same time has got to put a strain on the electrical grid. You can say goodbye to your electrical discount that most providers give during overnight hours when demand is low.
Another major issue if America’s power grid itself. New technology has increased the need for electricity over the past couple decades including cell phones, tablets, tech watches, and much more. According to an article by The Wall Street Journal titled “America’s Power Grid Is Increasingly Unreliable”, the U.S. electrical system is becoming less dependable, not more. According to the article, the pace of change, hastened by market forces and long-term efforts to reduce carbon emissions, has raised concerns that power plants will retire more quickly than they can be replaced, creating new strain on the grid at a time when other factors are converging to weaken it. Also, according to the article, large, sustained outages have occurred with increasing frequency in the U.S. over the past two decades. In 2000, there were fewer than two dozen major disruptions, the data shows. In 2020, the number surpassed 180. To be fair, the article does say that aging power lines and climate change, if you believe in that, are factors to the increased outages. However, it does say that going green is also a cause.
California is just one of many states that are committed to going fully electric over the next decade or so. The demand to change at such a rapid pace will undoubtedly have its challenges. California already has enough problems trying to keep the lights on during major heat waves and other situations of electrical high demand. To execute a major overhaul of the California’s entire electrical infrastructure within the next 13 years to support the millions upon millions of EV’s coming into the market is going to be extremely tough. Extremely is an understatement. Can they do it? It’s possible, but it doesn’t seem probable.
California should have started increasing their grid long ago before demanding that its citizens convert to fully EV’s over the next decade. Instead, they took the backwards route and are demanding that its citizens convert to EV’s before even having an infrastructure to support them. California only has about 3.5 years to make a significant change before tons of new EV’s come pouring into the market when the 35% mark of all new car sales must be EV’s becomes a reality. My guess is that by 2035, with all the demands that California is making, EV’s in the state will explode to 10+ million. That’s a huge increase from the 1 million they have now. California has their work cut out for them. I wish them the best of luck, but I won’t be surprised if this is one of the worst failures in modern American history.
The Cordell Account 