California Must Spend 20 Billion on Power Grid Upgrades If It Wants EVs

a reply to: LSU2018

It'll start in cities first then expand out.
Houston has plans to do it, I think Albuquerque is supposed to be the first. Or some other city out there in NM or Utah, I don't remember exactly.

a reply to: Boomer1947

It is closer to 3-4 million acres per year of treatment, either control burning or mechanical treatment.
I used to work for the Forest Service and planned fuel treatments.
I can tell you the acres needed to be done each year, year after year (stuff grows back), cannot be done. It is not a matter of money. The funding is actually there, for now. Whether the funding will continue or not remains to be seen. The limitation is environmental laws and uncooperative weather.
Control burning requires a narrow window of weather conditions. It must not be too dry and not too humid. The wind needs to be in the right direction, and not too fast or too light. And those conditions must occur on an allowable burn day under air quality regulations. One northern California National Forest did the analysis and found they averaged 18 days per year where weather conditions were ideal for burning and fell on an allowable burn day. You cannot have much of burn program on 18 days per year. Global warming modeling suggests the future will have fewer favorable weather days each year.
Mechanical treatment can be done in any weather, but requires the full gamut of environmental planning and costs more money than burning. NEPA, Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, etc all apply. Then you must find a buyer for the removed material, or eat the entire cost. California is trying to phase out biomass power plants for CO2 emissions at the same time it is trying to increase electric power generation. Many are already shuttered for various reasons.

Meeting the acreage targets is simply not possible. The state has set up mutually exclusive goals and policies.