The Harris Ranch Tesla Supercharger station is an impressive beast.
With 98 charging bays, the facility in Coalinga, California, is the largest charging station in the world.
In 2017, Tesla’s CEO said that all Superchargers in the automaker’s network were being converted to solar. [emphasis, links added]
“Over time, almost all will disconnect from the electricity grid,” Musk posted on X, formally known as Twitter.
Superchargers charge vehicles up to the 80% sweet spot in as little as 20 minutes, but to provide that kind of power for nearly 100 bays takes something solar can’t provide — diesel generators.
All Superchargers are being converted to solar/battery power. Over time, almost all will disconnect from the electricity grid.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 9, 2017
Investigative journalist Edward Niedermeyer discovered that the station was powered by diesel generators hidden behind a Shell station.
Reporters at SF Gate tried to find out how much of the station’s electricity was from the generators, but couldn’t get a response from Tesla.
The station isn’t connected to any dedicated solar farms, which means that absent the diesel generators, the station is powered by California’s grid.
According to the U.S. Energy and Information Administration, in June 2023, natural gas supplied nearly 5,000 megawatt hours of electricity in California, whereas non-hydroelectric renewables supplied about 7,250 megawatt hours.
Another Case
Energy analyst and writer David Blackmon, author of the “Energy Transition Absurdities,” told Cowboy State Daily that the use of diesel-powered generators is not limited to the Harris Ranch station.
He used to shop at a Whole Foods in Houston. The company had installed a charging station in front of the store for its customers.
“It was the best parking spot in the lot, and it crowded out a bunch of handicap spaces,” Blackmon said.
He said there were diesel generators behind the store and whenever someone was using the chargers, the generators would kick on.
Destabilized Grid
Just as these charging stations find they can’t run without some fossil fuel backup, the retirement of a coal-fired power plant in Kansas is being delayed to accommodate the energy demands of an electric vehicle battery factory that’s under construction.
Blackmon said that these stories illustrate well the lack of thought going into the demands that will be placed on the grid with increasing amounts of electric vehicle adoption.
As those demands pile on, U.S. energy policy pushes to remove coal, nuclear, and natural gas from the grid.
Blackmon said he watched all summer as the Texas grid, which operates separately from the rest of the county, nearly collapsed with the incessant heat.
“We almost had blackouts on Aug. 24,” he said.
State Sen. Cheri Steinmetz, R-Lingle, told Cowboy State Daily that despite claims that wind and solar alone can power the grid, they lack the reliability needed to satisfy energy demand. So, parts of the country, such as Texas, are facing shortages.
“Adding the load required for electric vehicles and the transportation network to support them would exacerbate the looming shortages we already face in the near future if energy policies are not reformed,” Steinmetz said.
No Way Out
Blackmon said that the footprint required to generate enough power to satisfy all energy needs with wind and solar is enormous.
It’s not just wind farms, solar farms, and battery factories, there are also thousands of miles of transmission lines to connect consumers with the power wherever it happens to be generated at any given moment.
This calls into doubt Musk’s plan to power charging stations off of solar.
“If that’s what he wants, then he only wants the chargers to work six to eight hours a day. If they’re purely powered by solar, there’s just no way out of that,” Blackmon said.
Top photo of a Tesla supercharging station by Soly Moses
UPDATE: A recent article from Business Journal writes the Harris Ranch Express BBQ management team says no diesel plants or diesel generators are on the Harris Ranch Resort (where the station is located). According to article commentators, people who visited the station found that the Tesla charging station gets its electricity from the Calif. power grid. The “lot is connected to the public grid” with two small solar plants and a wind plant nearby.
Read rest at Cowboy State Daily
There is no diesel generator at that site.
To power an EV Charging Station with diesel seems like a paradox. But probably necessary as wind and sun would not be sufficiently stable, and with a huge battery powered by wind and sun would be very costly. So what’s the point? Diesel cars seem more adequate, and may be fueled directly from the diesel tank.
There is something much more sinister afoot with “going green” than the man-made global warming lie, anyone older than 50 years of age knows by their own personal experience, that the sky is not falling and the oceans are obviously not rising. I highly doubt if these scare tactics have anything to do with saving the planet at all. It seems to me that if the powers that be can keep the masses of idiots afraid of something so monumental, that it is supposed to affect the entire world, that millionaires like Al Gore, that made all their money from scaring the sh_t out of people for absolutely no reason, can make billions off making people believe that man is responsible for the carbon that is allegedly destroying the ozone resulting in earth heating up and threatening man’s existence on earth. Think about it, if the masterminds can convince the masses of a lie this idiotic, they can virtually take control of those idiots and do with them what they want, for the rest of their lives.
The good news is that you can get an excellent steak at Harris Ranch while waiting for your EV to charge.
Would that be a Lab Grown Meat and/or Bug Steak to go along with the driving an electric vehicle dumb ‘Virtue Signalling’ image?!
Batteries are heavy and expensive. They are not a source of energy. They do allow us to burn coal and use uranium to power our vehicles. The construction of solar and wind farms is not keeping up with increasing electricity demand, so it’s disingenuous to claim that EV’s are green. We need more dependable electricity around the clock, not more batteries to store it.
The Irony and the Hypocrisy of going all Green and the Blunder I sure hope the M.S. Media are happy with a Dictator