California’s grid is a dumpster fire of cronyism and NIMBYism. It massively underserves it customers in almost every way.
California (pop.38m) produces ~200TWh of electricity every year. This is less than Alabama +Mississippi produces with ~8m people. California has to import ~100TWh from neighboring states. Texas (pop.30m) is on track to produce ~550 TWh this year.
Now you might say this is because California is superior on renewables? No. Texas produced 117 TWh of wind+solar generation last year, and so far this year generation is up 33% YoY (solar generation is up a whopping 70% this year!). California produced 69 TWh last year and YoY H1 it’s only up ~13%, which is half the YoY national average. Hell, next year Texas will likely produce more wind&solar electricity than Californian *total* production of electricity!
If California really wants to go EV, they are going to have to pull their heads out of their NIMBY asses. Outside of chronically underserving their power needs requiring roughly double the national average prices in order to drop demand to the level of supply, California has much less heating/cooling requirements than other states, and much, much less energy intensive heavy industry. This means however, that on a percentage basis production increases to supply a fully electric car fleet are going to be much harder for Cali than Texas:
Switching both CA and TX to full EV will probably require both states to increase electricity generation by ~150 TWh. This is equal to 3/4s of CAs current total generation! 150 GWh is only a 27% increase for Texas. It gets even worse for Cali though when you compare that number to the rate that Wind+Solar generation is increasing. W+S generation will likely be up by about 36TWh in Texas this year, but only 10TWh in California, meaning it’d take Texas about 4 years to make enough generation at today’s rate of increases to power their entire vehicle fleet… it’d take Cali 15 years!
NIMBYs right now (mostly on the left) are currently the single biggest obstacle to decarbonization.