California to ban sale of new gas-powered cars starting in 2035

[hobbsyoyo]

That raises an interesting question: does California have enough capacity in the electrical grid to support all of these vehicles? I genuinely have no clue, but it seems like CA suffers from more brownouts than other states; how are they planning on adding a whole bunch of new power-consuming appliances onto an already stretched infrastructure?

Capacity is not an issue at the moment but storage is. Over the last decade, California has heavy built out renewable capacity both at the grid and individual consumer level. Adding clean storage has lagged, however, so when the sun goes down, the grid is strained. Even so, this has only become a problem during extended heat waves rather than an all-year thing.

Edit: Also by then there'll be way more storage happening, and EVs coming home partially charged in the evenings then discharging during the tail end of the peak, before recharging later at low demand times, could also be a source of balancing against the drop off in solar

Unfortunately I think this sounds a lot easier in practice than in reality. It's fairly simple and cheap to add EV chargers but it's much more expensive to install reverse-charging infrastructure that can pull from cars during peak times. And on top of the technical issues, you also have to get people comfortable with this and signed up for it and given how challenging it is convincing people that their range anxieties are imaginary, I don't see reverse charging becoming enough of a thing to matter at the grid level for quite some time.

 

[innonimatu]

Unfortunately I think this sounds a lot easier in practice than in reality. It's fairly simple and cheap to add EV chargers but it's much more expensive to install reverse-charging infrastructure that can pull from cars during peak times. And on top of the technical issues, you also have to get people comfortable with this and signed up for it and given how challenging it is convincing people that their range anxieties are imaginary, I don't see reverse charging becoming enough of a thing to matter at the grid level for quite some time.

I agree. But the low-hanging fruit of encouraging use of electricity in the off-peak hours is there for the taking.