California Has a Plan to End the Auto Industry as We Know It

California also has the worst electrical infrastructure in the nation, and is not doing something like "requiring the EV people who will stress it" to pay a tax for improvements, or if they wanted to be punitive, a tax on gas cars to pay for it, or anything other than saying what a great idea this would be and pushing for it on the environmental side.

Given that converting all cars in CA to electric would seriously stress the infrastructure[1], yet they are not doing anything to improve that infrastructure, I can't say i'm impressed with california's long term thinking here ...

[1] Some back of the envelope math: there are 20,665,415 registered autos in CA. I'm going to exclude light trucks and trailers which make up another 12 million, and essentially double our numbers because they need more power/etc. every week. That's 79,560 (52x1530) GWH a year.

California produces 200,000 GWH a year, mostly from natural gas: http://energyalmanac.ca.gov/electricity/electric_generation_...

So they need to produce and distribute 40-50% more electricity than they do now to make this happen. Note that generation ability has not really moved from 2000. In fact, it's gone down! If they also want to meet their goal of moving generation to 33% renewable energy by 2020 (and eventually all of it), and thus provide this capacity without staying on gas, they'd basically have to double all available renewable energy output.

That's just the generation side. Then they have to make sure they can distribute it.

Don't worry though. I'm sure all the right people talk and plan this stuff together, and it's not just one part of the government doing something without thinking about the long term consequences that need to be planned for elsewhere - that never happens in government :)

Of course, the numbers above are just spitballing to show there is thinking that appears to not be happening (as to whether it's a good idea or not, i actually don't care whether my car is electric or not :P). The average car is driven 15 miles a day, so maybe it takes 2 weeks to deplete your 85kwh battery. But generally, no matter what sane thing you do to these numbers, halve them, double them (maybe cheaper cars use crappier batteries/engines, maybe they mean light trucks too, etc), it's still "a lot of extra to plan for". Even a 1-2% change in electrical capacity is serious business.

Until they actually have a serious plan for solving these issues, i'm just going to look forward to the lawn signs saying "80 volts is the new 120".

A huge amount of energy in gasoline is wasted as heat. About 70%. Electric plants lose much less energy due to reusing the heat fairly efficiently. There are some losses due to power transmission there of course. Keep in mind some electricity that ends up in cars would/should come from renewable sources...

http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/atv.shtml

Isn't that the truth. Unless there's been a breakthrough in the last few years, I remember storing hydrogen being an absolute nightmare: and not because it can combust, but simply because it's so small. Minimising leaks and achieving high storage densities, especially over longer periods of time, is super hard and not least because the hydrogen diffusion can cause embrittlement of metals too.

World GDP is about $87.25 trillion and California GDP is about $2 trillion, so California has more than 2% of world GDP. You could make the case that that's a more important metric than population.

I think this is why Tesla's home battery is going to be such a big deal in the near future. You could buy your own solar panel system and use it to charge your home battery, which would in turn power your electric car. You wouldn't be adding additional stress to the grid and it would probably be less expensive in the long-run. Not to mention that you'd be running on 100% renewable energy.