“This effort will extend far beyond California’s borders and will make it more difficult for Americans to get to work, drop their kids off at school, and travel to visit loved ones,” Latta said in a news release about the letter. “We cannot forget, California recently alerted residents to substantially reduce their energy consumption, and now, they are contradicting themselves by forcing folks to become more reliant on the electric grid through the mandatory transition from traditional vehicles to electric-only vehicles.”
Here, Latta is talking about a request California’s Independent System Operator made early last month when it asked residents to conserve energy amid a record-setting heat wave. The agency asked residents to set their thermostats to 78 or above, avoid using large appliances and turn off unnecessary lights between certain hours to avoid overloading the state’s electrical grid and causing widespread blackouts.
The crux of Latta’s argument is that installing the charging stations necessary to power the millions of electric cars that will eventually be on California roads will have adverse effects on other states. California already borrows one-third of its energy from neighboring states (65% of that comes from the Southwest, while 35% comes from the Northwest), according to a report from Forbes.
“These grid reliability concerns are so obvious that they cannot be ignored,” Latta wrote in the letter. “Clearly, the goal of [the state’s] new regulation is to put California on a path towards full electrification of the on-road fleet, which would mean the state would need to be able to generate enough electricity to continuously charge 30 million registered vehicles.”
The California ban only applies to the sale of new cars and light trucks that run on gasoline. The new rules set deadlines for implementing a full ban as a way to help automakers come into compliance; by 2026 and 2030, respectively, electric cars must account for 35% and 68% of all new cars sold. Hybrid vehicles, which run on gasoline and electricity, are allowed under the new rules as long they are capable of running at least 50 miles exclusively on battery power and are less than 20% of new vehicles sold in California. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency needs to sign off on the ban for it to take effect, which is why Republicans are lobbying Biden to block it.
State regulators say the ban will greatly shrink the state’s environmental footprint and will benefit the health of residents. California’s Air Resources Board expects the state will save $13 billion in health care costs related to pollution, including 1,290 fewer cardiopulmonary deaths, 460 fewer hospital admissions for cardiovascular or respiratory illnesses and 650 fewer emergency room visits for asthma. To mitigate the strain on the U.S. electrical grid that Latta and others are worried about, state leaders are already looking into what infrastructure would be required to sustainably power millions of electric vehicles.
New York has already adopted a similar ban, with the added caveat that the sale of gas-powered heavy trucks will be outlawed by 2045. After the announcement of the California ban, other Democratic-leaning states — including Massachusetts, Virginia and Washington — signaled that they would follow suit.