By David M. Greenwald
Executive Editor
Governor Gavin Newsom has set out a fairly aggressive agenda for transitioning the state toward electric vehicles by 2035. The necessity of this move is obvious—the need to transition away from fossil fuel powered vehicles and toward more renewable energy sources.
GHG emissions from transportation accounts for 27 percent of the total US greenhouse gas emissions, making it the largest contributor. By moving to EVs, we can greatly reduce our carbon footprint, especially as more states move to more renewable forms of electricity generation.
On August 25, the state air quality regulators “approved a regulation to formalize Newsom’s policy to ban the sale of most new gas-powered (vehicles) by 2035.” A few days later, the state began warning utility users that the expected heatwave would “require them to conserve to prevent outages.”
The two were not connected, but the coincidence led to people such as Senator Brian Dahle, who is running against Gavin Newsom this fall, to warn against the governor’s electric vehicle agenda.
“Can you imagine what it would be like if 50% of the cars were electric right now?” Dahle said Tuesday night. “They set goals without any plan of how to achieve those goals.”
Then there is Fox News host Tucker Carlson who took to the airwaves last week to attack California’s strained power grid.
He called electric cars “a new way to overburden California’s already collapsing energy grid” and added, “The instinct behind all of this is totalitarian, which is to say, total control over you.”
“This idea that moving toward ZEVs is to blame for the grid strain is moronic,” spokesperson Erin Mellon told the San Francisco Chronicle this week noting that the critics are not “interested in facts.”
She noted that these critics are “overlooking the outsize role extreme weather, fueled by climate change, has played in the strain on California’s energy grid.
“The only way out of this is to end our dependence on oil, and bolster our grid with more clean, reliable energy,” she said told the Chronicle.
Plus, it’s hardly just Californi—we saw what happened earlier this year in Texas when a huge winter storm hit. Power grids are vulnerable these days.
Axios this week pointed out that not only are EVs not straining the electric grid, “they just might save it.”
The reality is that right now, EVs “aren’t what’s straining the grid. California had roughly 680,000 registered EVs as of July 1, per S&P Global Mobility, accounting for less than 1% of the state’s total electricity demand.”
Further, “Even if there are 5 million EVs by 2030, they’ll account for about 7% of annual electricity usage and 1% of peak demand, according to the California Air Resources Board.”
Moreover, they note, “As more cars plug in, EVs could actually make the grid more resilient by supplying electricity back to the network when it’s needed most.”
What Axios found is that there is “plenty of spare capacity in the nation’s electric grid to power hundreds of millions of EVs, multiple studies have found — as long as charging is properly managed.”
That’s the key, as the Chronicle points out: “Most electric-car drivers already don’t charge during peak demand hours because it’s more expensive to do so.”
So they already have market-based incentives to avoid charging when they are charged the most money.
Instead, “The vast majority of EVs, including Teslas and Chevy Bolts, come equipped with a feature to let drivers schedule their charge for off-peak hours. PG&E and other utilities across the state also offer rate incentives for drivers to charge late at night, when demand is lower because people are asleep.”
“Anybody who has a Tesla will tell you they don’t charge their Tesla during the day. You only charge when it’s cheap,” said Michael Wara, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment. “People who say otherwise just don’t understand electric vehicles.”
Wara added that the notion that electric vehicles are straining the grid is also “absurd because there aren’t enough of them.
Where critics do have a point is on future demand.
But as Forbes pointed out doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation, even in the future, the US grid could be adapted to handle the supply of EVs.
They calculated: “In 2020, there were 286.9 million cars registered in America. In 2020, while the US grid had 1,117.5TW of utility electricity capacity and 27.7GW of solar, according to the US Energy Information Administration. If all the cars were EVs charging at 7kW, they would need 2,008.3TW – nearly twice the grid capacity. If they charged at 50kW, they would need 14,345TW – 12.8 times the capacity.”
However, “in 2020, the US grid generated 4,007TWh of electricity. Americans drive further on average than Brits – 13,500 miles per year, according to the US Department of Transport’s Federal Highway Administration.”
They find “an American car, if it were an EV, would need 3,857kWh per year, assuming the average efficiency figures above. If all US cars were EVs, they would need a total of 1,106.6TWh, which is 27.6% of what the American grid produced in 2020. US electricity consumption hasn’t shrunk in the same way since 2005 as it has in the UK, but it is clearly not unfeasible for all American cars to be EVs. The US grid could cope too.”
The key is that the transition is not going to happen overnight.
California is leading the way on this, but even with the ban on the sale of gas-powered cars, it doesn’t take effect fully until 2035. Even then, up to 20% of new vehicles could be plug-in hybrids that include gas tanks as well as batteries.
The Chronicle points out, “the state has 13 years to gradually prepare for the transition.”
Finally, critics are missing something very big here—what choice do we actually have? The state of California has been torn by heat waves, drought, floods, and wildfires. At some point, we are going to be hammered by rising sea level. In the totality of everything, transitioning away from gas powered vehicles is a clear step that has to be taken—and not just in California, but across the nation and eventually across the world, or we’re going to face much more serious problems than rolling blackouts.
Wrong, the point is California’s grid already can’t handle the load and it will only get worse with the mandate of more EV’s on the road. No one that I know of is blaming EV’s for the recent blackouts. So those are the facts, not Mellon’s spin.
Please explain. How does an EV supply electricity to the network?
Once again, the point is the network can’t handle the loads now, how much worse will it be with everyone driving an EV?
This article from Columbia University explains how EV to grid bidirectional technology would work: https://news.columbia.edu/news/how-electric-vehicles-could-fix-electrical-grid
Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) Technology
Here’s what I found from your link, correct me if I’m wrong:
It would be very expensive to implement.
It shortens the life of the batteries.
It doesn’t produce electricity but would allow the transfer of an EV’s electricity back into the network for sharing, but would have to draw again in order to recharge.
So would one be buying electricity in order to charge their batteries but selling it back to the network at a lower price?
Charging for electric cars accounts for only about 0.4% of the overall energy load during peak hours on a typical summer day, from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m., when the grid is most at risk, according to a consumer data forecast from the California Energy Commission.Newsom highlighted that data Wednesday as he punched back at Fox News and other outlets fanning the misconception. “This idea that moving toward ZEVs is to blame for the grid strain is moronic,” spokesperson Erin Mellon told The Chronicle. Newsom also said that pundits echoing such claims are “not interested in facts.”California’s regulation to ban the sale of most new gas-powered cars, approved last month, doesn’t take full effect until 2035 (and even then, up to 20% of new vehicles could be plug-in hybrids that include gas tanks as well as batteries). In other words, the state has 13 years to gradually prepare for the transition.Most electric-car drivers already don’t charge during peak demand hours because it’s more expensive to do so. The vast majority of EVs, including Teslas and Chevy Bolts, come equipped with a feature to let drivers schedule their charge for off-peak hours. PG&E and other utilities across the state also offer rate incentives for drivers to charge late at night, when demand is lower because people are asleep.
There are only 300,000 EV’s on California’s roads today.
By 2035 there could be 30 million.
So what EV’s draw today is minimal but the system still has blackouts. That’s the point, as more EV’s hit the road it will only get worse.
My lights have remained on without significant interruption for the past 4 years. Mr. Olson, please cite some data that demonstrates that the current electrical grid is unable handle the current number of electric vehicles. The recent blackouts in Davis were caused by electrical safety issues according to PG&E, not shortages.
Are you saying all of the outages are because of safety issues? I was down in the Fresno area a couple of weeks ago and there was an outage there that lasted 7 hours.
Oh my gawd, please read my comments above. I never said that, I stated there are outages now without the influx of the millions of new EV’s that are mandated by Newsom. Think of the problems of what that extra draw on the system will create.
I think his point is that there really aren’t a lot of outages now and if we have over 13 years to prepare for the ramp up, that seems pretty feasible, plus as Don points out, even in 2035, it’s not like suddenly there are going to be all electrics on the road.
Keith O
Two problems with your claim. First, the generation supply and the supporting grid are not static and will be expanding to meet these needs. California already added 2,500 megawatts (MW) of new energy storage in the last two years and is on track to add tens of thousands of MWs more by 2030. The state also has added more than 25,000 MW of solar generation in the last decade. The metered peak load has been shifted from 3 pm to 6 pm entirely due to the addition of 10,000 MW of distributed solar.
Second, there’s so much excess solar generation during the middle of the day, that we can charge storage batteries, including those in EVs, and use that power later in the day when solar output declines. This is where EVs come in. They will have charging software that will control the timing of when they draw power and then return some of that power to the grid. When we get to a full fleet of EVs, according to my calculations (see in the linked blogs) we will be able to replace the entire peak load generation fleet by using only 5% of the capacity of the EV fleet. Drivers won’t notice a reduction in range, and there will be override provisions for those who need a full charge at the beginning of the day. (Most drivers are able to go most of week on a single charge–think about your current car–do you always have a full tank, or do you wait until it’s much closer to empty?)
https://mcubedecon.com/2021/07/27/electric-vehicles-as-the-next-smartphone/
https://mcubedecon.com/2022/03/22/pge-takes-a-bold-step-on-enabling-ev-back-up-power-but-questions-remain/
https://mcubedecon.com/2015/12/29/getting-ev-owners-to-participate-in-electricity-storage/
https://mcubedecon.com/2015/12/29/getting-ev-owners-to-participate-in-electricity-storage/
https://mcubedecon.com/2015/07/06/cheap-energy-storage-may-be-parked-in-your-garage/
Here’s three studies by E3 on how EVs will support renewables in the grid:
https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2020-10/e3_cn_final_presentation_oct2020_2.pdf
https://www.ethree.com/new-e3-report-rate-designs-harnessing-vehicle-grid-integration-technology/
https://www.ethree.com/e3-finds-up-to-5-billion-in-benefits-from-ev-adoption-in-new-york/
Studies show that there is little degradation in battery life if the charge is kept between 20% and 80% of capacity. In addition, drivers will be compensated for any battery degradation–there cars are not going to be used for free. Don’t pretend that people aren’t already well down the road thinking about these issues that you just became aware of.
And yes, you’re wrong about your take aways from the Columbia report. I don’t see where you get that it’s expensive to implement V2G systems. In fact, the report says that it will be much less expensive than relying solely on expanding the grid. (And it will be less expensive than the alternative of expanding oil drilling and production facilities–don’t forget that part of the equation.) The article explicitly states that battery life will not be shortened if the charging is managed by software, which is exactly what is happening (the auto industry isn’t run by complete idiots). And the EVs charge when power is cheapest (midday on solar and late night when loads are lowest) and then discharge into the grid during the highest priced peak period from 5 to 8 pm. The point is to transfer super cheap solar power (there are no operating costs) from midday to the evening peaks, using storage in the EVs that was bought for a completely different reason (to travel). There are lots of moving parts but they will be well integrated in the end and we’ll have a more reliable grid.
Larry Elder, formerly candidate for governor, made a direct link between EVs and the grid crisis. This is the public expression of that view: https://twitter.com/larryelder/status/1565101677736337410
The ban in 2035 is on the sale of NEW cars. It will not ban people from owning, driving, or selling used conventional vehicles. As such, it will take quite awhile for a majority of cars in California to be EV, particularly until there are numerous models at lower price points.
Mr. Olson claims that there was a 7 hour outage in Fresno 2 weeks ago, but cites no official cause. That outage could have been caused by a any number of reasons and not a shortfall.
https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article265168801.html
All of the outages on the grid this year (except in one case where a set of municipal utilities got the wrong instructions from CAISO for about 30 minutes) have been caused by local distribution grid failures. All of the outages in Davis last week were due to failed transformers. In our neighborhood this year we’ve had three multi-hour outages under different weather conditions that were caused by distribution system issues. None of these have had anything to do with generation capacity sufficiency. We made it through a record peak (52,000 MW) exceeding the previous peak by almost 1,500 MW under exceptional, unprecedented weather condition. And further the previous two highest peak loads were in 2017 and 2006! In other words our peak load has grown only 3% over the last 16 years. We’re not yet on a path towards growth that might strain our grid supplies.
I’m impressed as to how the governor (within a span of a few months) can go from advocating $800 payments to existing motor vehicle owners ($400 for each one – up to two), to banning new ones entirely.
And extending the life of Diablo Canyon (he apparently wanted ten years, but only got five).
https://calmatters.org/environment/2022/09/diablo-canyon-legislature-california/
All while continuing to support growth/sprawl – as if that isn’t directly connected.
It’s going to be interesting to see if hydroelectric power is impacted by drought/climate change.
There is no way that even the existing demand for electricity is going to be met with 100% “green” energy. Sure, it will be “electric” – so maybe that’s enough to confuse or placate some folks. (Probably the same folks who see nothing wrong with paying people to own motor vehicles.)
Another issue is the “forced blackouts” which are not caused by power shortages, but by fire danger.
“Sorry, boss – couldn’t make it in today because PG&E was worried about burning Paradise down, again.”
(And yes, the state will make sure that the costs are spread to everyone, to bury lines. And of course, they won’t bury all of the lines, as it would likely be overwhelming to attempt it.)
Same thing with property insurance – everyone will pay – regardless of risk. And they’ll continue rebuilding in those same high-risk zones, thereby necessitating a power shutdown again.
And all it will take is some yahoo with solar panels, to start a fire regardless.
Ron O
What expertise do you bring to opine on whether we’ll reach 100% renewables? I suggest that you look at the E3 report that I linked in my comment above and you’ll see how this will happen. (And it might be 95% renewable for a while, but that’s damn close.) And there are a number of other reports making the same conclusion.
Asking what “expertise” I have (or don’t have) isn’t a legitimate talking point. I have a computer, with a world of information at my fingertips.
Already, the state has extended the life of Diablo Canyon.
It’s likely that the state will employ some form of controversial “carbon sequestering”, to misleadingly “count” toward zero emission claims.
In any case, here’s one article which notes some of the challenges:
https://www.latimes.com/environment/newsletter/2021-02-11/california-pledge-clean-energy-boiling-point
We could also explore the energy, resources, and environmental damage that will occur as a result of manufacturing, installing, and maintaining so-called “renewable” technologies. Here’s the first article that popped up, regarding that:
https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/02/01/south-america-s-lithium-fields-reveal-the-dark-side-of-our-electric-future#:~:text=Why%20is%20lithium%20extraction%20bad,an%20increase%20in%20global%20warming.
I’m not opposed to the goal. However, some folks seem to believe in the “technology gods” to eliminate the impact of people and modern society on the environment at large. This is both naive and downright harmful. In fact, I’d say that there’s a “developing” cult regarding this (pun intended).
Sorry – but if population is not stabilized (and world “cooperation” is achieved), none of this will make a whit of difference. All it will do is delay the inevitable, and make the reckoning even worse.
Not just with energy, but all resources.
In the meantime, we can’t even stop the war in Urkaine.
I would also add that there’s a built-in incentive for anyone with a business connected to this broader field to present a pretty optimistic outlook.
Given the cost, there’s lots of money to be made in doing so.
And apparently, plenty of gullible people and politicians.
I’d say that the state has a “better chance” of forcing cities to grow (via, “unsubsidized, low-cost housing”) in already-expensive areas during a housing downturn, with a declining population. 🙂