No, California Is Not Going to Take Your Generator Away

&gt;No, California Is Not Going to Take Your Generator Away<p>&gt;If these rules are adopted as proposed, emissions standards for SOREs will be raised to technically infeasible levels from 2024 onwards, effectively prohibiting production of SOREs for the California market. Generators are included in this, although they will not be completely restricted until 2028<p>I&#x27;m really hate the framing&#x2F;title of this article. It almost reads like the &quot;clinton &#x27;acid washed&#x27; her email server&quot; fact check[1]. It sets up a strawman premise, proceeds to fact check&#x2F;debunk it on some minor technicality, and begrudgingly admits the general point is true in the middle of the article.<p>I mean, who seriously thinks the state of calfiornia is literally going to go around and seize everyone&#x27;s gas generators? I searched for &quot;california generator bill&quot; and the top 5 results all mention the ban was limited to the sale of gas generators in either the title or google&#x27;s snippet.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;nbcnews&#x2F;status&#x2F;785299709342654465" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;nbcnews&#x2F;status&#x2F;785299709342654465</a>

The alternatives offered in the article don&#x27;t seem well thought out.<p>My parents house, in a somewhat rural (but not THAT rural) part of California had a power outage that lasted from Christmas into this year (and the power is still going out sporadically).<p>The straightforward solution is to buy a generator for $1-$2k and use it sparingly to keep the heat running and maybe the lights and a computer.<p>The solution offered here is to get solar panels (which cost maybe $20-30k after the tax credit) and a Tesla Powerwall for another $10k. But if it snows hard enough to take out their power lines, I can&#x27;t imagine that the solar panels will perform well. So they&#x27;d be spending 20-40 times more money on a solution that won&#x27;t work as well (and that&#x27;s before going into location specific problems, like the giant trees that would block the panels, some of which are on other people&#x27;s property)

If it’s law, someone will enforce it at some point.<p>&gt; What the bill does do, is to give legal force to new rules currently being made by CARB. If these rules are adopted as proposed, emissions standards for SOREs will be raised to technically infeasible levels from 2024 onwards, effectively prohibiting production of SOREs for the California market. Generators are included in this, although they will not be completely restricted until 2028.<p>Ah so 2028.<p>Funny, a friend of mine runs a tree clearing business. As of right now there’s only <i>maybe</i> one decent (electric) chainsaw that would meet the requirements, that would enable you to clear trees. And it’s 5x the prices of gas powered chainsaws.<p>What does this mean? More fires, less forest management.<p>I’m sure there’s other machines and vehicles needed for forest management, so this problem will compound.

No, they won’t “take your (existing) generator away”, but they <i>will</i> make buying (new) generators increasingly expensive and difficult to buy.

Any time I see a headline of the form &quot;No, X isn&#x27;t going to Y&quot;, X does Y within six months.

I’ve become quite a Ryobi fanboy after several years with many of their 18V and 40V battery-powered tools. They always have quite enough power to do the job, and are exceptionally easy to maintain. I had one of my batteries go bad once and Home Depot simply swapped it out for a new one.<p>I see this law as a nudge in that direction, and I think that is generally viable as these devices are well into mainstream adoption.<p>I agree with the article that the generator point is mostly scaremongering. Having survived a collective month worth of days without power in northwest winters without a generator I’m skeptical of the average Californian’s need for one. I’m certain there are good use cases for them and as the article and comments here are clear: they aren’t being taken away. In fact, they are commonplace, and likely to be hoarded by people who won’t use them for years at a time, then wonder how to plug them into their house when they need to use them lol. Commercial backup power generation aren&#x27;t considered SORES and aren’t even that dirty since they need to be efficient.<p>I can’t help but hear faint echos of outage about seatbelt mandates in these diatribes.

No, they&#x27;re not going to &quot;take away&quot;, but they will prevent you from purchasing.<p>There are arguably practical alternatives for leaf blowers and some uses of small gasoline motors, but replacing generators seems much more expensive (solar + batteries), impractical (solar won&#x27;t help you when it&#x27;s dark for long periods of time), or impossible (in the case of portable generators).

Passing regulations that are technically infeasible for generators to hit, (after 2028[0]) is most definitely something worth being upset about[1].<p>[0]By admission in linked article<p>[1]Unlike leaf blowers, there aren&#x27;t viable alternatives for small engine-powered generators.

Do these requirements apply to backup generators (usually portable diesel devices) for ensuring business continuity in case of power-failure? That is a use case that has a strong business need for ensuring IT functionality, a strong social need for ensuring key services (e.g. medical facilities) work after&#x2F;during various natural disasters, and has a minor environmental impact, since those generators are run only rarely.<p>It would be ridiculous if businesses wanting to ensure backup power in 2028 would have to resort to &quot;used generators, and new generators bought directly from other states&quot; as the article suggests.

The headline is misleading. It&#x27;s not going to take your generator away, but it will make it illegal to make and sell new generators in California.

Correct, you&#x27;ll just have to go to another state to get one, or build your own from a small motor kit.<p>If you have <i>any</i> experience with US gun laws, you know exactly how this works.

First they came for your gas cans. Now they are coming for your generators. I will say, gas powered leaf blowers and edgers are so polluting it&#x27;s horrible. Electric battery powered is so much better but I feel for the landscape people. That is such a huge burden for them. You need to have so many batteries and chargers to make it a full day.

That&#x27;s not very smart because batteries are terrible!<p>Most of my electric portable appliances had their battery die on me or decline significantly at some point and since many were either:<p>1) not replaceable or<p>2) replaceable with an impossible to find spare,<p>I had to dump whole perfectly working items (except the dead battery). This could be mitigated if there is a standard battery format but for many reasons it will oppose good engineering for each item.

As a Californian having to live with power cuts lasting 3 to 4 days at a time, 5 to 6 times a year due to public safety power shutdowns or just old and faulty equipment, I think the legislators might want to fix the monopoly of the incompetent PG&amp;E before turning to greenwashing everything they see on their way.

The interesting part is when CARB does do heavy-handed regulation as they struggle to get to 0% emission.<p>To this, I would say “good luck with that”.

I just bought a back pack blower this winter.<p>Thinking about putting both a CA state flag sticker on it and a Hacker News one just for kicks.

Folks, as you know the planet is getting warmer. Eventually we will need to shift to alternative means of providing backup electricity, means that don&#x27;t have a huge negative externality for everyone else. Libertarian policies aren&#x27;t going to make that happen.

It pairs oddly with the NEM 3.0 proposal to de facto tax solar panels at $8 per kilowatt per month going forward because that seems like the only clean alternative that could charge a large battery to replace that generator.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;solarbuildermag.com&#x2F;residential-solar&#x2F;californias-nem-3-0-proposal-impact-on-solar-value-fees-could-add-up-to-more-than-the-cost-of-the-systems-themselves&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;solarbuildermag.com&#x2F;residential-solar&#x2F;californias-ne...</a>

Inevitably there will be a disaster of some kind and generators will be required to help people but whoops all the generators are gone. And the officials will say &quot;well there&#x27;s no link between our dumb law and the lack of generators! people should have bought batteries!&quot;<p>If this sounds unlikely to you consider their response to the shortage of trucks and cargo bins piling up at the ports.