California is facing problems with its green electric plans
The plan of banning petrol cars by 2035 will be hard to turn into reality.
Frank LehmannOctober 2, 2026
California Governor Gavin Newsom announced last week that sales of new internal combustion engines would be banned from 2035 as part of the state administration's latest effort to reduce its carbon footprint. This move has been praised by environmentalists and automakers alike - the latter have already allocated billions to build an EV presence. But there's one problem the Golden State could solve by 2035, if the ban is to work: its power supply. Last month, California faced the first blackouts in about two decades when a heatwave spiked electricity usage. This, in turn, showed that state demand exceeded supply - including imported electricity - and sparked a debate about whether the state was too aggressively expanding its renewable energy capacity for its own good. The debate is important if California plans to have millions of EVs on its streets in less than two decades. These EVs will increase the demand for electricity and there is no guarantee that they will need that electricity during off-peak hours. In the meantime, California will continue to expand its renewable capacity, but likely not its gas capacity. According to some, this could be a problem as gas provides a significant base load when solar and wind power cannot feed electricity into the grid. Others, however, have allayed these concerns. The president of the California Independent System Operator, the network operator of the state of California, said in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times that the problem is more complex than some claim. A lack of imports and, above all, the fact that the California grid is operating "too close to the margin" were the main reasons for the outages. "We knew we were going to get into the day on Friday, that it was going to be tight, but that's not unusual," Stephen Berberich told the LA Times. "We are often short of money. And the void is generally closed by imports. In this case, because it was hot in the west, we were not able to get the imports we would normally get. Renewable energies are available not the focus of the issues we had on Friday night. But with renewable energies there are improvements in the form of batteries, which, according to Berberich, could help with the load problem. However, they won't solve it alone. Solar, he found, isn't available around the clock. In fact, "solar has practically no value in the net peak hours in the evening". This interruption has plagued the sun - and, perhaps to a lesser extent, the wind - for years. Batteries keep getting bigger and better, but they still have a long way to go before they can completely replace constant fuel power plants. In other words, California's power grid is quite prone to outages, especially during the summer season. When authorities asked Californians this summer to conserve energy to prevent blackouts, they did so. But can the authorities mandate EV charging times to reduce the load on the power grid? That will hardly work for millions of people.
