California also has the worst electrical infrastructure in the nation, and is not doing something like "requiring the EV people who will stress it" to pay a tax

California also has the worst electrical infrastructure in the nation, and is not doing something like "requiring the EV people who will stress it" to pay a tax for improvements, or if they wanted to be punitive, a tax on gas cars to pay for it, or anything other than saying what a great idea this would be and pushing for it on the environmental side. Given that converting all cars in CA to electric would seriously stress the infrastructure[1], yet they are not doing anything to improve that infrastructure, I can't say i'm impressed with california's long term thinking here ... [1] Some back of the envelope math: there are 20,665,415 registered autos in CA. I'm going to exclude light trucks and trailers which make up another 12 million, and essentially double our numbers because they need more power/etc. <10% of autos are electric, but i'll just remove 10% to round nicely, and say "18 million non-electric vehicles. If they move to 85KWH cars, depleted and charged once a week, now we have an additional 85KWH x 18 million cars of electric power being used once a week. That's 1,530,000,000 KWH or 1530 GWH extra that needs to be generated and distributed every week. That's 79,560 (52x1530) GWH a year. California produces 200,000 GWH a year, mostly from natural gas: http://energyalmanac.ca.gov/electricity/electric_generation_capacity.html http://energyalmanac.ca.gov/electricity/electric_generation_... So they need to produce and distribute 40-50% more electricity than they do now to make this happen. Note that generation ability has not really moved from 2000. In fact, it's gone down! If they also want to meet their goal of moving generation to 33% renewable energy by 2020 (and eventually all of it), and thus provide this capacity without staying on gas, they'd basically have to double all available renewable energy output. That's just the generation side. Then they have to make sure they can distribute it. Don't worry though. I'm sure all the right people talk and plan this stuff together, and it's not just one part of the government doing something without thinking about the long term consequences that need to be planned for elsewhere - that never happens in government :) Of course, the numbers above are just spitballing to show there is thinking that appears to not be happening (as to whether it's a good idea or not, i actually don't care whether my car is electric or not :P). The average car is driven 15 miles a day, so maybe it takes 2 weeks to deplete your 85kwh battery. But generally, no matter what sane thing you do to these numbers, halve them, double them (maybe cheaper cars use crappier batteries/engines, maybe they mean light trucks too, etc), it's still "a lot of extra to plan for". Even a 1-2% change in electrical capacity is serious business. Until they actually have a serious plan for solving these issues, i'm just going to look forward to the lawn signs saying "80 volts is the new 120".