Monday, August 29, 2022

California leadership

California is out front again.

Zero-emission vehicle policy is ahead of support technology.

Moore
Electric and fuel cell cars and light trucks are on the horizon, but there will be some bumps in the road after California's August 25 vote adopting regulations phasing in over the next decade. Its decades-old anti-smog rules unleashed technology which changed the automobile industry. Cars are far cleaner now. Now California is moving to zero emissions. By one estimate the next generation of rules will trigger sales of 17 million zero-emission vehicles within California by 2040. If Gov. Gavin Newsom is correct, more than a dozen other states will follow the Golden State’s lead mandating ZEVs, as the zero emission vehicles are called by regulators. 

The big question is: Can they get the supporting infrastructure in place? After all, Toyota offers its Mira hydrogen fuel cell vehicle in 2022. But you’ll have to be in the San Francisco Bay area, greater Los Angeles, San Diego, Truckee or at one of three fuel cell stations in Sacramento to make your Mira go. Its range is said to be 402 miles. Electric vehicle charging stations are still scarce in parts of California, and without what’s known as a J1772 Adaptor, other EVs can’t charge at any of the many Tesla stations.

Hints of the problems California faces came in testimony at the public hearing when the rules were unanimously adopted. Tam Moore has been a journalist for over 55 years. He calls himself retired but he still occasionally plies his trade, so he listened in to that testimony. He’s been a hybrid vehicle driver since 2005, roaming the rural areas of Northern California and Southern Oregon where he says finding a plug-in is "downright difficult."


J1772 Adaptor.  $159.99 at Amazon


Guest Post by Tam Moore

I used to attend and report on lots of government regulation, so Thursday morning I joined the Internet to see what California’s Air Resources Board (CARB) did with a staff proposal which by 2036 mandates almost every new automobile and light-duty truck sold in the state be powered by electricity. 

This is a precedent-setting action with ripple effects across West Coast and Mountain States. Oregon and Washington often use California anti-pollution rules as a foundation for their states. 

More importantly, we share a regional electric power grid.

California doesn’t generate enough electricity to take care of its own needs. Electric power is wheeled in and out of the California grid big time. Juicing up future California electric cars will be a lot more than beefing up in-state local distribution systems. 

Future plans for California’s increased electricity demand, at least in a January 2022 paper posted on the Internet, call for much of the new power to be from sources such as solar and wind, buffered by massive collections of batteries storing juice for use when those intermittent generating sources are down.


Trouble is those big batteries exist only on paper. Technology hasn’t caught up.

Marcus Gomez, representing the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and his own business, which includes a fleet of medium-duty trucks, declared the new rule ”Is just another expense to my business.”

“We need to diversify (vehicle energy sources),” he said. “If we go all-electric that means California is vulnerable to cyber-attack.” 

The final public hearing and pre-vote comment by CARB members began at 9 a.m. and didn’t end until 1:45 p.m. Board members unanimously adopted the complex regulation, despite plenty of advice to slow down the process.  It’s effective January 1, 2023 and sets vehicle standards through 2040. 

It takes approval from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency before the state can start enforcing the standards, which apply to domestically-produced and imported autos and light-duty vehicles. Another set of rules, which don’t mandate all-electric fleets, apply to heavier vehicles. 

“I expect tomorrow to see this action labeled extreme (by the news media),” said board member Dean Florez. He’s a former state legislator and he told the board that experience included the lesson “Don’t mess with people’s cars.”

That said, Florez went to the basic arguments California government has used since CARB began regulating automobile emissions back in 1990: Clean air, better health for the state’s 39,185,605 residents and uncounted future residents.

Michael Saragosa, vice-mayor of Placerville in the Sierra Foothills, sent in a written statement on vulnerability of the local electrical grid. 

“The State’s energy agencies just issued a warning our electrical grid lacks sufficient capacity to keep the light on this summer. El Dorado County already is victim to capricious “PSPS” events, and this Plan will only exacerbate our region’s blackouts and bring more suffering to residents. Also, we are not close to having the infrastructure necessary to support an all-electric future…” he wrote. 

Staff estimates show implementation will cost car-makers an average of $2 billion a year more between 2026 and 2040 while in the same period reduced consumer  costs for gasoline and related items will average $6.2 billion a year. There’s another structural change coming to California –a loss of about 65,810 jobs at gas stations and other retail outlets. 

A witness noted that the path to all-electric began as a footnote to CARB’s first auto emission rules. The process resulting in the massive rules called Advanced Clean Cars II (ACC II in bureaucratic jargon) began in 2017. 

“What if the build-out of charging infrastructure cannot keep up with the ACC II mandates, and Californians cannot charge their EVs?  What if the grid cannot reliably keep up with the ACC II mandates, and Californians find themselves routinely stranded, unable to get to and from work/ school, unable to obtain food or medical assistance,” asked Elizabeth Bourbon, a Valero oil company lobbyist. 

That’s a question for the future. CARB didn’t provide an answer.







12 comments:

Peter C said...

I'm betting the used car market in 2040 will be wild. Buy stock in CarMax! Signs saying "Get Your Gas Guzzlers Here while they last" !!! Until the whole country goes battery powered, the California car market will be a mess.

The batteries have to be better. The charging has to be quicker. The battery powered cars have to be cheaper. Other than that, no problem.

Diane Newell Meyer said...

I can see Tam Moore's point on this. Also, much as I would like to see this effort toward climate change as a step in the right direction, I think the political fallout will be negative. I worry about this issue when it comes to the midterms in California. California is not ready for this, for many reasons.
Some of us drive old clunkers due to cost. Older cars do not even have to pass the I & M inspection here in Oregon. What about sale of used cars? There is no way I could afford an electric car. I am hardly alone with this problem.

Michael Steely said...

California is mandating zero emissions because it finally learned that our addiction to petroleum products has us stewing in our own juices. Clean air, clean water and fertile soil are good. In fact, they’re essential for life. How long will it take the rest of us to learn that poisoning them is stupid and self-destructive?

If plug-in cars turn out not to be the ultimate solution, we’d better figure out what is really fast. I think by now anybody whose brain hasn’t already been fried can recognize that climate change is like cancer or Trump – ignoring it won’t make it go away.

Michael Trigoboff said...

Pure political virtue signaling by Newsom, unaccompanied by any sort of practical plan to achieve the objective.

If you build it, they will come…

… unless they can’t charge their vehicles.

Talk is cheap. Building the infrastructure that an all-electric fleet of vehicles requires is not.

Ocean fertilization, which could potentially pull as much CO2 out of the atmosphere as we want to, would be enormously cheaper.

Phil Arnold said...

In 1888 Bertha Benz drove the very first car 100 kilometers to test her and her husband's invention for practicality. She stopped along the way at pharmacies to buy ligroin to run the .75 horsepower engine, there being no gasoline stations. Her trip convinced Karl Benz their invention was feasible, giving him confidence to show it at the 1889 Paris World's Fair.

In 1901 (13 years later) Germany produced 900 cars per year and the US was producing around 4000. Gasoline pumps had been invented and gasoline was available to drive those cars.

California has voted to ban the sale of internal combustion cars in 2035, 13 years from now. Certainly, it is possible to have the electricity to propel the electric cars and to ramp up production to supply those cars.

I think we will make it.

Mike said...

Point of information: There have been a number of geoengineering proposals that involve profoundly altering the air or oceans. All have serious cons, not to mention all the likely unintended consequences: https://www.newscientist.com/gallery/geoengineering/

When our behavior is causing harm, there’s no real substitute for stopping the behavior.

Michael Trigoboff said...

Point of further information:

Everything has consequences. Geoengineering has potential consequences; so does not doing geoengineering.

Europe is about to spend this winter freezing in the dark because they decided to cancel nuclear power and depend on Russia for their energy supplies. They wanted to be green; they will end up blue and shivering.

There’s no real substitute for accurately understanding the tradeoffs we face, unblinded by green (or any other) ideology.

Ed Cooper said...

So many people think, without proof, that geoengineering is a silver bullet, with solutions like Ocean Fertilization, as just one example. Yet too many folks embrace the "Silver Bullet" without any consideration of unexpected, or unintended consequences, which often will require even more radical, or more expensive solutions.
I don't pretend to know the answers; if I did, I wouldn't be an aging retired truck driver, but would be searching for answers which might appeal to large swaths of the public, and not get pooped on by every other "conservative" afraid of change.

Rick Millward said...

We are crippled by our inability to see beyond the current moment.

Those who throw up objections to the future...hubris at the least and at the worst?...

John F said...

The resistance to converting to EVs will be in the areas where private power has not provided increases to carrying capacity of the grid. Public power and the Rural Electrification Act (REA) enacted by FDRs Congress brought electricity to the countryside, farms and ranches. The REA also created a Public Power agency to manage and meter the power. BPA (Bonneville Power Administration) in the Northwest is a public power agency. REA completed its work in the early 50s. No new development revenue have been authorized beyond maintenance and oversight costs.

Electrifying the countryside by building out the grid to provide additional capacity is needed to eliminate fossil fuels role in generating electricity. Due to the large population and demand in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada transmission lines are designed to push power to them for revenue. Wheeling electricity to population centers is very profitable for private utilities, as Texas rate payers found out a winter ago.

Plants that can come online quickly are gas turbines but they need to be sited near high pressure gas pipelines so in this case you're powering your EV with natural gas or coal. Even then much of the rural transmission lines need voltage and capacity upgrades. All this being true, the push back will come in states like Wyoming, Texas, Montana, South Dakota and North Dakota where fossil fuels are abundant. In the Mountain States and Central States, drive distances for commutes are 100's of miles. The build out in solar and wind renewables is now cost competitive but the the lead-time to begin generating may take a decade and may have little immediate impact on the increased demand.

Obama's administration was first to promote the smart grid that allows electricity to be routed on demand the length and breath of the country reducing "wasted generation" and distributing electricity where needed. The smart grid has not been developed! Their plan for infrastructure buildout was scuttled by partisan politics after passage of the ACA.

California is the pacesetter in automotive transition and change and is the first to legislate EVs replace ICEs in 15 years., I imagine the great debate has started and Biden's infrastructure act will provide funding for charging EVs on major roadways. How soon and to what standard is in flux.

Michael Trigoboff said...

Have any of you noticed that the necessary degree of CO2 reduction isn’t happening and isn’t likely to happen? China is building a new coal-fired power plant every week! The developing world is apparently not going to forgo development to limit CO2 emissions.

No amount of scolding by Greta Thunberg is going to change that.

If you want to do something effective about climate change and you don’t like geoengineering, what’s your plan?

Mike said...

The U.S. led the world in emitting greenhouse gases for over a century, until China overtook us in 2006. It’s time we lead the world in reducing it, and not by altering our oceans and atmosphere. We’ve done them enough damage.

Our petroleum addiction is killing us as surely as if it were fentanyl. Dismissing the concern as “green ideology” makes it no less true.