I'm ready to trade in my electric car. Here's why
I love my electric car. I really do.
I love how I never have to buy gas. I love how it glides quietly up the street. I love that it has so much pickup that I can easily blow past gas-powered muscle cars if I want to. I love having stickers that allow me to drive solo in the HOV lanes. I love that routine maintenance consists of little more than rotating the tires.
But after three years, I am thinking seriously of trading it in for the gaspowered hybrid plug-in version.
Why? Because as much as I love my car, I loathe that I can't travel around California, a state that has led the electric car revolution, with confidence that I can get a charge when I need one.
Yes, there are significantly more public charging stations than when I first got behind the wheel of my Kia Niro EV in January 2020. But there are also significantly more electric vehicles vying to use them — and still vast areas of the state without a single fast charger. Chargers are more reliable now, but still not quite good enough. In 2020, it felt like half the public chargers I tried to use weren't working. These days, l find only about a quarter are out. This jibes with the experience of researchers who checked public fast chargers at 181 charging stations in the Bay Area last year and found that about 23% weren't functional.
Even with more chargers, they still aren't easy to find. I have an app that helps, but it only gives me a general location. Public charging stations are often tucked away in remote corners of parking lots or behind buildings with no helpful signage. They may be accessible only during business hours or, if in a hotel, only for paying guests to use.
It's not uncommon to locate a charging station and discover that all the chargers are in use or blocked by cars not charging. Or, most frustratingly, the chargers may be offline or nonfunctional — which you may not discover until you park, plug in and try to start the charger. And even if the stars align and you find an available charger that works, it may shut off mid-charge with no warning or reason.
When I chose an electric vehicle, I knew that meant an extra 30 minutes in travel time for each charging stop during a road trip. But I did not count on the time wasted by having to, for example, backtrack to another station or one out of my way because the charging station on my route was not working.
Things are improving, but if the pace of change over the last three years is an indication of what's in store for the next three years, the policies to push increasing numbers of EVs by California and the Biden administration are in trouble. It's not enough to set sales targets and offer tax credits. If we want people to embrace fully electric cars, we have to make it easier to charge up away from home.
As part of the bipartisan infrastructure law, the federal government is spending $7.5 billion to build 500,000 chargers across the nation, which is great. But if it continues to be this much of a hassle to charge up, it's going to be tough to convince motorists to go green.
I don't know if I will trade in my EV, because I really do love it, charging issues aside. But I'm taking a road trip next month, and if the state of public charging isn't much improved from my last road trip, well, it's going to be hard not to make the switch.
After its first committee hearing, Assembly Bill 1337 was amended last week, which could be the opening salvo of a monumental political and legal war over who controls access to water in California — an issue that stretches back to the state's founding in 1850.
If enacted as now proposed, AB 1337 would overturn a key state appellate court decision and give the state Water Resources Control Board the legal authority to curtail diversions from rivers — even by those who now hold the most senior water rights, those gained prior to the state asserting authority over water in 1914.
The legislation, carried by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, would bolster a yearslong drive by environmental groups to enhance natural river flows by reducing agricultural diversions during periodic droughts.
The stage was set eight years ago when, during one such drought, then-Gov. Jerry Brown declared an emergency and the water board attempted to impose restrictions on pre-1914 rights holders, contending that there simply was not enough water to meet their demands.
A curtailment order and a more than $1 million fine served on the Byron-Bethany Irrigation District, which serves customers in three counties on the southern edge of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, symbolized the conflict.
“We are a test case,” Byron-Bethany's manager, Rick Gilmore, said at the time. “I think this has become a larger issue. I think the water board wants to use this as a precedent so they can start to gain more control over senior water right users.”
An immediate confrontation was averted when the board modified its orders but litigation continued over the underlying issue of whether the board could curtail diversions by senior water rights holders via emergency order.
Byron-Bethany and other rights holders won at the trial level but the state appealed, only to lose again last September in the 6th District Court of Appeal in a decision known as the California Water Curtailment Cases, which is specifically referenced in the revised AB 1337.
“It is the intent of the Legislature that this bill clarify that the State Water Resources Control Board has the necessary authority to curtail pre1914 water rights and address the gap in the state board's authority revealed by the court in the series of cases known as the California Water Curtailment Cases,” the measure declares.
In the aftermath of the 2015 clash over curtailment orders, Brown and later his successor, Gavin Newsom, sought to avoid direct confrontation by forging “voluntary agreements” under which farmers would give up some water to increase river flows for fish and other species.
The process was spurred by the board's 2018 release of draft water quality regulations that would require roughly 40% of natural river flows to reach the Delta, thus sharply reducing agricultural diversions.
A few months later, in his first State of the State address, Newsom declared, “Our first task is to cross the finish line on real agreements to save the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta. We must get this done — for the resilience of our mighty rivers, the stability of our agriculture sector, and the millions who depend on this water every day.”
The voluntary agreement process has achieved only minimal success, and environmental groups, which opposed it, continue to press the water board to finalize and enforce its long-pending water quality rules.
Given the immense stakes, AB 1337 and several other measures to enhance the water board's authority will be the subjects of intense legislative skirmishing. Pardon the pun, but 2023 could be a watershed year not only for its immense amounts of rainfall and snow, but for the 173-year war over control of California's finite water supply.