Sunday Commentary: The Latest Right Wing Scare – EV Straining the Electrical Grids

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.