England will turn off electric vehicle chargers to prevent blackouts. Is this Minnesota’s future?

England’s acceleration toward electric vehicles (EVs) is putting its electric grid at risk of blackouts.

According to the Daily Mail, England will automatically shut off new electric vehicle charging stations at people’s homes for nine hours per day on weekdays to prevent EVs from overwhelming the grid.

Under regulations that will come into force in May, new chargers in the home and workplace will be automatically set not to function from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. to 10 p.m., when people get home and hope to recharge their vehicles. Public chargers and rapid chargers on motorways will be exempt.

This means England will ban the sale of gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles by 2030 but not allow everyone to charge their cars when they get home from work.

California is already beginning to experience similar problems, mandating the sale of electric vehicles in the state but begging people not to charge them when the sun is setting, and electricity is in short supply.

Unfortunately, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is importing these failed policies to our state by adopting California’s electric vehicle mandates, which will require auto manufacturers to stock 14,000 electric vehicles in the state every year.

American Experiment’s 46-page comments opposing the Walz administration’s California car mandates warned that these mandates might reduce the reliability of the electric grid, citing our increasing reliance upon unreliable energy sources like wind turbines and solar panels.

Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) bureaucrats dismissed these concerns, which are clearly legitimate, by saying that these concerns are “outside the scope of this analysis.”

The problem here is that these energy realities don’t go away just because the MPCA was not curious enough to investigate them. This lack of curiosity will harm all Minnesota families by making the electric grid and transportation networks less reliable.

Minnesotans want dependable cars at affordable prices. They don’t want to be told which cars they can buy or when they can refuel them.