Labor Day today, which means I'm writing this on the couch with a fan pointed directly at my face instead of at my desk, because my "office" (spare bedroom, no AC vent) has been sitting somewhere around 84 degrees since Thursday. California's having one of those heat waves where every local news station just repeats the words "excessive heat warning" for a week straight, and the state grid operator has been sending out Flex Alerts basically every single day since the start of the month. If you're not from here, a Flex Alert is CAISO (the outfit that runs the power grid) asking everyone, nicely, to not run their AC or dishwasher or dryer between 4pm and 9pm so the whole grid doesn't fall over. Set your thermostat to 78. Unplug stuff you're not using. Don't charge your EV during peak hours.
That last one is the part that's been stuck in my head all weekend.
Ten days ago the California Air Resources Board voted to phase out sales of new gas-powered cars by 2035, which was a big deal, got covered everywhere, all the usual arguments happened online about grid capacity and whether the state can even handle it. And now here we are, less than two weeks later, and the same state is sending push notifications asking people not to charge the EVs they already own because the grid is maxed out from air conditioners. I'm not saying this is some grand hypocrisy or that the 2035 rule is doomed, I actually think its fine as a target that far out. But the timing is funny in a way that feels very 2022. We're simultaneously mandating the future and asking people to please not use it between 4 and 9.
My brother has a Model 3 and he texted me Saturday like "so I guess I just... don't charge it today?" and just set it to charge at 2am instead, which honestly is what smart charging schedules are for, this isn't some crisis, it's just an inconvenience that made for a good tweet. But I get why it reads weird to people who don't follow this stuff closely. You spend eighteen months hearing "the future is electric" and then the government's own emergency alerts are telling you to hold off on plugging in your electric car because there isn't enough electricity. Bad optics, even if the underlying logic is completely fine (more supply is coming, batteries and storage are being built out, this is a short-term capacity thing not a permanent one).
Anyway. I've had my laptop's fan screaming for four days straight and I'm fairly sure the thermal throttling is why a video export that usually takes about six minutes took almost eleven last night. Not scientific, I didn't benchmark it, I just noticed it and got annoyed and closed forty Chrome tabs like that was going to fix anything. It didn't. It's the CPU, not the tabs, but old habits.
The one nice thing about a heat wave weekend is that it's basically forced me to stay off the bike (too hot to ride past about 9am) and actually sit down and go through the backlog of newsletters and RSS stuff I never read. Found a couple of things worth passing along later this week once my brain isn't soup. For now I'm mostly just counting down until this cools off, which the forecast says should happen by midweek, finally.
If you're also somewhere in the valley or the Bay Area right now: hang in there, keep the blinds shut during the day, and if your power company sends you a Flex Alert text, maybe don't be the person running the dryer at 6pm. We're all in this together, or whatever the grid operator's PR team wants me to say. I'll take the fan-on-the-couch setup over a rolling blackout any day.
Back to normal posting once it's not 90-something degrees in my house at 8pm.