California’s green dreams mean adding more EVS to a rickety grid

SACRAMENTO: California’s fight against global warming is on a collision course with its rickety grid.

The state aims to end net greenhouse gas emissions by 2045, forcing many things that burn fossil fuels – particularly vehicles, factories and buildings – to switch to electricity.

And yet California, the world’s fifth-largest economy, struggles to keep the lights on during its increasingly severe heat waves.

The state legislature recently voted to keep California’s last nuclear plant open past its planned 2025 retirement after projections showed years of tight power supplies to come.

But even with the plant running, power demand will stretch the limits of supply – and that’s before millions of electric vehicles (EVS) plug into the grid.

California wants most new cars to run on electricity by 2035 and may require new houses to contain all-electric appliances, perhaps as soon as 2026. EVS accounted for 15% of new car sales in the state this year, though only 800,000 of the 30 million vehicles on the state’s roads are EVS (plus about 400,000 plug-in hybrids).

“The state’s ambitions are way ahead of reality,” said Gary Ackerman, founder of the Western Power Trading Forum, a coalition of more than 100 companies advocating for competition in Western electricity markets.

“You can glorify a zero-carbon world, but the reality is going to be much different and the timeline is going much slower.”

Conservative commentators have pointed with glee to California’s brushes with blackouts this week – the state on Friday cancelled an emergency without having to resort to outages – coming so soon after finalising rules for phasing out sales of new, gas-burning cars.

But beneath the snark lies a real issue: California’s climate policies will increase electricity demand.

They will require a grid that carries far more power than it does today, perhaps 80% more by 2045, according to a recent estimate from the California Air Resources Board.

New solar and wind farms plus large-scale batteries are being plugged into the grid as fast as supply chains will allow, with renewables last year supplying a third of California’s electricity.

Modelling from the Energy Innovation Policy & Technology research firm shows electricity demand could grow 18% from 2020 levels by 2030, as vehicles and buildings start to electrify.

Keeping up with that growth is quite doable, said Michael O’boyle, the firm’s director of electricity policy.

“We can maintain reliability and start to wind down the gas fleet, but we really need to maintain focus on execution and building out a diverse clean-energy portfolio,” he said.

That includes the California Energy Commission’s new target of installing two gigawatts to five gigawatts of offshore wind turbines by 2030, a technology not yet deployed on the West Coast.

As for those EVS, they could become a powerful tool for stabilising the grid, rather than crushing it. Their batteries could supply power back to the grid in times of need, then recharge later, when electricity supplies rise. — Bloomberg