This article is clearly pro-EV...but consider the enormity of what really needs to be done to complete the 'energy transition'. Palo Alto boasts about 4500 out of 52000 registered vehicles and already they are constrained by their grid.

One more heat pump...one more car charger...and local peak power limitations risk damaging legacy grid infrastructure. Think about what this would mean on a national level.

Heck, think about what this will mean just in California as they make ICE cars illegal in the not-to-distant future. Where is there enough capacity to build the transformers that transition is going to need? We're talking about problems after LESS THAN 10% of cars are EV in Palo Alto. California wants to move to 100%. What sort of problems will their be when California achieves double Palo Alto's penetration? That would be 20%...far short of California's goal.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-ev-transition-explained-2658463709

"Of the 52,000 registered vehicles in the city, 4,500 are EVs"

"Palo Alto must have 80 percent of vehicles within the next eight years registered in (and commuting into) the city be EVs (around 100,000 total). The projected number of charging ports will need to grow to an estimated 6,000 to 12,000 public ports (some 300 being DC fast chargers) and 18,000 to 26,000 residential ports"

"Tomm Marshall, assistant director of utilities, stated, “There are places even today [in the city] where we can’t even take one more heat pump without having to rebuild the portion of the [electrical distribution] system. Or we can’t even have one EV charger go in.”"

"A 2020 electrification-impact study found that without improvements, more than 95 percent of residential transformers would be overloaded if Palo Alto hits its EV and electrical-appliance targets by 2030."