The grid needs 30% more power generation. If all cars are EV. CA is doing rolling blackouts as it is.

Maybe Californians will be riding horses in the next 10 years ;)

I am curious how a voluntary "please conserve power 4 hours a day during a historic heat wave" request turned into "CA is doing rolling blackouts because they don't have enough energy" in the minds of millions. Residential electric use doubled over the past 30 years without issue.

The NYTimes The Daily podcast described the voluntary request as “the state asked people to not charge their EVs” (paraphrase). Poor quality information everywhere.

Rolling blackouts are separate from Flex Alerts.

Hence me asking why they're being conflated in the public consciousness.

Are they? Both of these things happen regularly in California and have been for decades.

California is a big state. In Southern California, neither of those things happen regularly (source: I've lived here since 1980). The last time they did happen regularly was with Enron.

There is substantial unused grid capacity overnight and during the day that the most basic of smart grid logic can schedule the car to turn on charging during.

In other words, shift the demand from the 4-9PM slot that is the hot spot.

For what this doesn't cover, this is not rocket science. We will build the capacity. It's just wires and generators.

And storage.

I work at an engineering firm that is heavily involved in these efforts in SoCal, and this is probably boring to say (without details) but the storage component is fascinating. Not my sector, though, so I won’t/can’t elaborate (I do work in sustainable transportation planning, though).

Even if all new cars were 100% electric from now on, it'd take twenty years to convert all cars. 30% more power generation in 20 years is 1.5% per year. Not a big ask.

Enjoy your substantial power cuts.