Here in California they fee, tax and ask you not to charge when things get a bit warm (summer). The infrastructure (electrical grid) here needs a lot of work.
Yeah this is pretty crazy. California is really pushing the conversion to EV’s, but the grid is not there to support such a massive change in electricity demand. There’s these stupid articles that claim CA’s grid can support it, which at face value should be very dubious when CA, like a number of other states, has difficulty supporting power demand as is.
The claims the grid can support it is predicated on a ton of assumptions, including people will charge their cars at home, at night. That seems to be common today, but I’m not sure that’ll be the case down the road. This is especially true in cities where installing chargers is prohibitively expensive, especially if people rent their parking spaces. Also consider many older homes don’t have the optimal electrical service, which costs thousands to upgrade. And given the advancements of fast charging even in the past serval years, EV charging may operate more like gas stations for many people. If you can charge 200 miles into a Lucid Air (with the proper infrastructure) in 12 minutes, people won’t necessarily invest in home chargers.
Such claims also depend things like improved transmission (historically a nightmare of lawsuits that make it impossible), installation of a smart grid, and the ability to suck power out of peoples parked cars that are plugged in- which the grid is not setup to do, expanded renewables and storage, etc.
I’m not anti-EV or green energy. There are many applications where they make sense and I would rather see federal money spent installing solar panels in the American Southwest than upstate NY in order to best optimize generation.
That said, there are legitimate concerns that have to be taken into consideration for these goals to become reality. We do have serious issues like generation, transmission, renewable storage, rare earth mineral mining and processing capacities, etc that must be looked at seriously. And Nuclear is the obvious solution to a lot of this, especially novel nuclear technologies that are safer and produce less waste- the answer has been staring us in the face for decades. Supplying the future demand of batteries and elements like copper for electric motors, heat pumps, etc may prove difficult.