So California managed to do two contradictory-looking things in the space of about a week, and I keep thinking about it. On August 25th, the Air Resources Board voted to phase out new gas car sales entirely by 2035 (35% of new cars sold have to be zero-emission by 2026, then it ramps up every year after that). Real policy, not a press release stunt. And then six days later, with a heat wave sitting on top of the state, the grid operator sent out a Flex Alert asking everyone to avoid charging their electric cars between 4pm and 9pm because the power grid was creaking.
I dont even own an EV and I found this funny in a way that isnt actually funny.
Look, I get why both things are true at once. The 2035 rule is a target, not a light switch — it doesnt mean every car on the road tomorrow is suddenly electric, it means new sales ramp down over thirteen years. And the heat wave is its own separate emergency; temps have been sitting in the high 90s and pushing past 100 in a lot of the state for days now, and the grid just wasnt built for this many people running AC at full blast at the same hour every evening. Two true things. But if youre the person who just heard "gas cars are getting banned" and then two days later hears "please dont plug in your electric car right now," the whiplash is real, and I dont think the state's messaging people thought hard enough about how those two announcements would land back to back.
Heres my actual complaint, and its not really about the ban itself, which I support. Its that the sequencing is backwards. You dont announce the end date for gas cars before youve shown people the grid can handle the EVs already on the road today. My neighbor has a Tesla and he runs an extension cord looking charging cable across our shared driveway most evenings (I trip over it at least once a month, its become a whole thing) and even his one car charging at 6pm during a Flex Alert window feels like its own tiny act of civil disobedience right now. Multiply that by a few million cars over the next decade and you start to see why "just charge it whenever, the grid's fine" is not a sentence anyone in Sacramento should be saying with a straight face this week.
Ive had my thermostat set to 82 since Tuesday, which is miserable, and my laptop has been running hot enough that the fan sounds like a small aircraft taking off every time I open more than six tabs. Not really related to the EV thing, just a fact about my week. I did the responsible-citizen thing and ran the dishwasher after 9pm and didnt use the dryer at all, hung everything on a rack in the bathroom instead, which is its own kind of small annoying ritual you dont think about until the grid asks you to.
The part that actually bugs me isnt the ask itself — conserve energy during a heat emergency, sure, thats reasonable, Ill do that every time. Its that this is going to keep happening, on a bigger scale, every single time we get a heat wave for the next several summers, right as the number of EVs on the road keeps climbing toward whatever the 2035 target assumes. The state needs storage capacity and grid upgrades to actually be ahead of the sales curve, not catching up to it during a crisis week. Otherwise every future heat wave comes with the same slightly absurd split-screen: one press release banning the thing, another press release asking you not to use the replacement for the thing, four days apart.
Anyway. AC's still at 82. Neighbor's cable is still across the driveway. Ill probably still trip on it tonight.