Tesla's dirty little secret on California's I-5

The secret is apparently that the site operates some local diesel generators at holiday rush periods to backstop the grid.<p>Isn&#x27;t that exactly what we want though? You draw the clean power to the extent practical and then burn the junk fuels only in extremis. That allows for greater uptake of EVs on the whole while minimizing impact. What&#x27;s the alternative being proposed? Sell fewer EVs or limit how much they can drive over holiday weekends? Who is that helping?

Idiotic hit piece. They did this because the infrastructure wasn’t there yet. Otherwise it would make zero sense as diesel is many times more expensive than grid power. As soon as grid power is available the diesel would be shut down.<p>Sometimes you have to do weird and seemingly silly things when you are doing something new. For some reason this reminds me of early server farms for web services in the late 1990s that had PS&#x2F;2 mice hanging off the back of every server to allow them to boot properly. Silly example but shows the principle.<p>Lots of dumb anti-EV hit pieces lately. Oil and ICE industries must be worried.<p>Of course now lefties are piling on since Elon started huffing the same brand of glue as Tucker Carlson.

&gt; Hidden in plain sight across the way from the Harris Ranch Supercharger’s main stations, behind a Shell station, is a small diesel plant that has helped power Tesla’s footprint.<p>Could have fit that in the title...

The dirty little secret of my F-150 is that although it does not require massive lithium mining and subsequent environmental pollution, it in fact requires the combustion of hydrocarbons thousands of times a second every time I start the engine. Needless to say I&#x27;m shocked and I am looking into alternatives.

This is a completely predictable outcome of an energy policy that pretends that intermittent power generation is substitutable for dispatchable power generation. Also related to a distributed energy system (diesel&#x2F;gasoline) vs a centralized system (electrical grid).

TL;DR: a stop on I-5 has superchargers powered by a Diesel generator if there isn&#x27;t enough power to power them all

Not a ton of substance but I do see this being expressed often:<p>&gt; Time and again, every Tesla owner at the Harris Ranch Supercharger had a similar story. Their car wasn’t perfect — neither is the company — but it’s the best option for now to do long-range driving, to get them from one end of the state to another, especially at the front end of a busy weekend.<p>We have two Teslas and I really enjoy them even with their downsides. But I am _really_ excited for more brands to get a good charging experience on the road (convert to NACS in NA) and can&#x27;t wait for the competition to keep on ramping. There are some awesome EVs out there hampered a lot by a lack of solid charging networks.<p>I really want to kick Tesla&#x27;s butt into gear with more competitors.

This is an odd article. Just a massive Elon hit piece with little of substance.<p>I&#x27;m certainly no fan of Elon but this is not journalism, it&#x27;s just an I-hate-Elon blog.<p>It makes the typical lazy assumption that all EV charging happens at fast chargers, which is not even close to being the case. Most people charge the majority of the time at home, and in California, approximately 60% of electricity delivered to your home comes from carbon-free sources.<p>The site linked to from the article, &quot;Elon Musk Today&quot;, is kind of interesting. It claims to track things that Elon said he would do, but hasn&#x27;t, and sure enough there are <i>plenty</i> of these, but it includes things like making X &quot;The Everything App&quot; and starting a program to research how to convert CO2 into rocket fuel.<p>Are they really complaining that these things haven&#x27;t happened overnight? That&#x27;s just petty.