IE 11 Not Supported

For optimal browsing, we recommend Chrome, Firefox or Safari browsers.

Electric Vehicles Are Great ... but What Happens During a Heat Dome Event?

It is a complicated world we live in.

I have written about the issue of electric vehicles in disasters before, but this is a new twist I did not identify previously. See this from Sept. 1: “Why is California asking EV drivers to limit charging this weekend?

Note that California has mandated that all new cars sold in 2035 and beyond will have to be electric.

We are going to need hundreds of thousands of electric vehicle charging stations in the very near future. More importantly, we are going to need electricity available to fuel all those electric vehicles. Does everyone, meaning delivery trucks, etc., all halt all operations when there is a heat dome event in the future? We can easily predict these heat events will happen much more frequently in the future.

Hmm, then there is the state and federal gas tax that is collected for maintaining our roads. That funding is going to dry up and have to be replaced by some other revenue stream. Might it be a tax on electricity?

One issue begets a solution and that solution begets other issues.
Eric Holdeman is a contributing writer for Emergency Management magazine and is the former director of the King County, Wash., Office of Emergency Management.