California’s Electrification Push Creates a ‘Single Point of Failure,’ Argues American Thinker Essay

California has moved well past nudging its residents toward electric cars and away from gas stoves. According to a commentary published in American Thinker by Jim Cardoza, the state’s endgame is something more sweeping: making Californians dependent on the electrical grid for nearly everything.

The essay, published September 24, 2026, argues that Sacramento has assembled a familiar policy toolkit—subsidies for favored technologies, regulations aimed at their competitors, and mandates that push households off gasoline and natural gas. Cardoza writes that this combination raises a question the state rarely confronts: what happens when the one system everyone now relies on goes down?

The policy stack

Cardoza walks through the architecture of California’s electrification strategy as he sees it. On transportation, the state adopted rules requiring new passenger vehicles sold by 2035 to be zero-emission—effectively ending the sale of new gas-powered cars. In the meantime, he notes, politicians have layered on subsidies and incentives to make EVs more attractive while imposing increasingly burdensome regulations on the gasoline-powered vehicles they are meant to replace.

The same playbook shows up inside the home, according to the essay. Building codes promote electrification. Government programs subsidize electric heat pumps, water heaters, and induction cooking. Regulators have pursued zero-emission standards for new space and water-heating equipment, and some local governments have gone further by restricting natural gas equipment in new construction altogether.

The result, Cardoza writes, is a strategy that simultaneously subsidizes the preferred technology, regulates against its competitors, and mandates a shift toward electricity—all while Californians already pay some of the highest power rates in the country.

The cost side of the ledger

Those rates are not a matter of perception. Cardoza cites California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office, which he says has noted that residential electricity rates in the state run roughly twice those elsewhere in the country. Between 2019 and 2023, average California residential electricity rates rose about 47 percent, he writes, compared with roughly 18 percent for overall consumer prices. The state’s costly greenhouse gas policies rank among the primary drivers, according to the essay.

For Cardoza, there is an obvious incoherence in the state’s approach: making electricity exceptionally expensive at the same time government is requiring citizens to use more of it.

Building requirements add another layer of expense. The essay points to state standards requiring EV-charging capabilities in new residential construction and mandating solar photovoltaic systems on new single-family homes. Politicians keep demanding changes that drive up the already high cost of building housing, he writes, while simultaneously wringing their hands about affordability.

The resilience argument

But Cardoza argues that the financial cost may not be the greatest danger. The bigger risk, in his telling, is that concentrating life’s necessities in a single system creates a single point of failure.

He asks readers to picture the ideal California home of the future: an electric stove, an electric water heater, an electric heat pump handling both heating and cooling, an electric family car, and perhaps garage doors, communications equipment, and virtually every other important household system drawing on the same grid. Then the grid goes down, and one failure affects nearly everything.

California, the essay notes, does not have to imagine this. The state has experienced blackouts, extreme-heat emergencies, and deliberate public safety power shutoffs meant to reduce wildfire risk. During an extended outage, an electric stove can’t cook dinner. An electric water heater eventually stops delivering hot water. Heating or cooling disappears. An EV in the garage may hold plenty of stored energy, but once its battery is depleted, the family’s primary transportation is dead.

Solar panels can improve household resilience, Cardoza concedes, but panels alone don’t keep a home running during a grid failure. Proper equipment and, for sustained backup, battery storage or another backup source are required.

Contrast that, he writes, with a diversified household. Its electricity may fail while a natural-gas stove still provides another way to cook where service remains available and safe. A gasoline car holds energy stored independently in a fuel tank. A generator might supply emergency power, batteries can run radios and flashlights, and solar plus storage offers yet another option.

Resilience, in his formulation, doesn’t come from pretending a system can’t fail. It comes from ensuring that when one system fails, everything else doesn’t fail with it.

Beyond the grid: cash and single points of failure

Cardoza extends the argument past energy. He notes that Americans increasingly live in an almost cashless world, tapping phones against terminals, inserting credit cards, or moving money electronically. The convenience is extraordinary—until the system stops working.

During an extended electrical or communications outage, internet connections can vanish, electronic cash registers may stop operating, card terminals can become useless, and ATMs may be inaccessible. He offers a scenario: standing in a functioning neighborhood store during an emergency, with food, bottled water, and batteries ten feet away, holding thousands of dollars in the bank and several credit cards—while the payment network is down. At that moment, the essay says, your wealth is real but inaccessible. A few hundred dollars in physical currency suddenly looks remarkably sophisticated.

The lesson, he argues, generalizes. A family reliant on one transportation method is more vulnerable than one with alternatives. A business dependent on a single supplier is more exposed than one with several. Information stored in one place is more fragile than information backed up elsewhere. A society dependent on one communications network, one payment mechanism, or one energy source grinds to a halt when that system fails.

Central planners, Cardoza writes, naturally prefer uniformity. One approved technology is easier to regulate and control. One energy system is easier to manage. One payment network is easier to administer and monitor. Liberty, by contrast, contains redundancy: millions of individuals making independent decisions, pursuing different solutions, and preparing for different risks. Some choices succeed; others fail. But one person’s failure doesn’t have to become everyone’s.

What the essay actually asks for

Cardoza is careful to say the question is not whether electric cars, heat pumps, solar panels, induction stoves, or electronic payments are good technologies. The question, as he frames it, is whether politicians should deliberately eliminate or discourage alternatives, making citizens dependent on one centrally regulated infrastructure for nearly everything.

His prescription is not a ban on anything new. Keep the electric car if you like it, he writes, but keep gasoline-powered ones available. Let customer demand, not political proclamations, keep the energy market diverse. Use the heat pump, but don’t sacrifice alternative heating and cooking options. Pay with your phone, but keep some cash in the house. The objective, he insists, isn’t resistance to technology—it’s resistance to dependency.

“The most dangerous systems are not necessarily the unreliable ones,” Cardoza concludes. “They are systems upon which everything else has been made to depend.” Resilience comes from alternatives, he argues, and so does liberty. Dependence on any single system trades individual resilience for centralized vulnerability—a reality, he writes, that no government mandate can repeal.

The essay appears as California continues to implement the electrification rules its agencies have adopted in recent years. Whether voters and lawmakers treat grid dependency as a feature or a flaw is, for now, an open question—one Cardoza argues Californians should be free to answer for themselves.

Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/mandating-grid-dependency/