Gasoline-powered lawn mowers, leaf blowers to be banned under new California law | Hacker News Reader

Gasoline-powered lawn mowers, leaf blowers to be banned under new California law

arstechnica.com

23 pointsthrowawaysea25 comments

The actual law [1] says almost nothing about banning gasoline-powered engines, but rather details reducing emissions. CO2 is not considered an emission, which comprises "including oxides of nitrogen (NOx), reactive organic gases (ROG), and particulate matter (PM)." ICE cars can qualify as "zero emissions vehicles".

Banning ICEs for portable equipment is absurd [2]. The power density just isn't there. Plus, what if you need to charge your battery equipment? Are you gonna use a battery powered generator? Of course not.

> (E) Expected availability of zero-emission generators and emergency response equipment.

This is clamping down on things like sooty two-stroke weedwackers and force them to have some kind of emissions controls. May even require a catalytic converter on all ICEs. It's not a blanket ban on all ICEs.

Ok downvoters, read the law/proposal and tell me where I'm wrong.

1 - https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

2 - anyone thinking "but batteries" I challenge you to hike 200m into the woods and up a 100m hill with a battery powered chainsaw and spares, I'll bring 2 gallons of petrol and a Husqvarna, we'll see who fells more trees. That was my summer of 2017, good times.

> I challenge you to hike 200m into the woods and up a 100m hill with a battery powered chainsaw and spares

Is California planning on mandating battery-powered chainsaws? Or are you worried about the slippery slope between lawn-care equipment and logging equipment?

> The small off-road engine (SORE) category consists of off-road spark-ignition engines that produce 19 kilowatts gross power or less (25 horsepower or less), including lawn and garden, industrial, logging, airport ground support, and commercial utility equipment, golf carts, and specialty vehicles.

https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/our-work/programs/small-off-road-engi...

Thanks. Neither the article nor the law indicate what SORE equipment includes other than lawn equipment.

The proposal is fairly clear that its aim is to replace all SORE with zero-emission alternatives by 2035. And in reality 100% of those will be battery powered.

This is very similar to automobile phase-outs which will similarly be described in headlines as "bans" because that's a short and clickbaity word.

They'll generally not specify the tech or approach, and just try to legislate the specific problem they are trying to solve instead to leave options open.

And similarly to them, the comments on HN will be full of people claiming that a 15 year transition plan is unworkable because they can think of some obscure use case that they think the current tech can't handle (usually on no real factual basis whatsoever) which even if correct, is irrelevant unless there is some serious doubt that future tech in 2035 can't handle that case adequately.

I was surprised that this also bans gas-powered generators. What about people who live in rural areas? What are they supposed to do if they want to live off-grid or simply run a generator from time to time? What about those who need a generator backup for medical reasons (like refrigerating insulin)? And how would those working in the timber industry manage with just electric chainsaws? Battery-powered ones may not be powerful enough - and if you have to use a cord, you also need a way to recharge your power source out there.

Not to mention PGE's planned shutoffs. I'm guessing a lot of exceptions will be made here for specific use-cases/industries.

Which is why legislation is often hundreds+ pages long.

They aren't banning generators, they are just banning generators which generate emissions - including oxides of nitrogen (NOx), reactive organic gases (ROG), and particulate matter (PM). It likely means selling an engine without a catalytic converter will be restricted.

California needs to upgrade it's electrical infrastructure before all of these mandates take effect. Wildfires and the impact on Feather River Canyon / where a number of fires have started the last couple of years. Droughts and the impact on hydro-electric capacity. High-wind / red-flag days causing outages.

These are things that are regularly happening. They should be occasional, not occurring multiple times a month.

The big one is going to be the phasing out of fossil fuel vehicles. In addition to infrastructure, California does not have the generation capacity for what these mandates / initiatives will require. Take a look at rolling brownouts on extremely hot days due to the use of air conditioning.

Micro-grids and local generation are topics that come up as possible solutions. Then you have to deal with infrastructure, NIMBYism, practicality - areas with extreme weather conditions (snow/etc).

There is a larger question that needs to be addressed before we can go zero-emission at any particular scale.

Also - someone will mention solar - places that get a lot of snow, rain, maybe are in areas with tree cover - solar isn't always sufficient for the needs of a house let alone a community.

While I applaud the move away from small ICE tools, I have to wonder how e.g. landscaping services will adapt. A day's work will certainly outstrip the capacity of a single battery for a lawn mower or leaf blower. So the contractor will use multiple batteries, and likely have a charging setup mobile with them. How will they power the charger, by running a small generator on their equipment trailer, by idling the work truck and using an inverter or like?

Electric trucks like the F-150 Lightning and Rivian R1T with their built in electrical outlets and massive batteries would solve the problem almost entirely. With that you’d only need a couple of backup batteries in a charger plugged into the truck.

Naturally companies won’t roll their truck/van fleets over right away but this pressure has potential to advance the timeline of that particular transition significantly.

most landscaping operations are just a couple dudes and a old truck. now they have to buy a top of the line electric F150 to do their jobs?

That’s just how it is now. In a few years, there will be old electric trucks to buy for such purposes. If combined with a phased banning of small ICE devices (such as that proposed by another comment on this story’s thread), the transition won’t be too bad. It’s never going to be perfectly smooth and it has to happen at some point.

> In a few years, there will be old electric trucks to buy for such purposes.

With degraded, old batteries to match.

s/few years/few decades/g

> Electric trucks like the F-150 Lightning and Rivian R1T with their built in electrical outlets and massive batteries would solve the problem almost entirely. With that you’d only need a couple of backup batteries in a charger plugged into the truck.

> Naturally companies won’t roll their truck/van fleets over right away but this pressure has potential to advance the timeline of that particular transition significantly.

Then you're just siphoning power from your transportation. With the limited-ish range on EVs[0][1], EPA estimates not being loaded down with the extra weight of equipment, and power losses due to voltage conversion I don't see this as a viable alternative...yet. Add in the cost of these vehicles being much higher than current ones[2][3] and this is most likely a non-starter for most of the affected.

[0]: F-150 Lightning is estimated at 230 miles on the regular config https://www.ford.com/trucks/f150/f150-lightning/2022/

[1]: Rivian R1T is very vague throwing out an EPA estimate of 314, then mentioning 400+ or 250+ mi https://rivian.com/r1t

[2]: F-150 Lightening starts at $39,974, a standard F-150 starts at $29,290.

[3]: Rivian R1T starts at $67,500

Similar to the "electric cars will just use coal powered electricity" argument, what you describe sounds like an improvement from the status quo even in a worst case scenario, and something that simple economics will take care of anyway.

Certainly, I'm not trying to posit it as a reason not to move towards these tools, just thinking out loud.

I would think one small genset powering a bank of chargers is more efficient than a handful of small ICE engines in varying states of maintenance and tuning but honestly don't know.

Maybe just buy 12 batteries that last 1 hour each? Given labour costs in California that's probably few days worth of investment?

Also - does the law even apply to professional market? In a way if the tools are so good they would've switched way earlier than consumer.

The same way a battery powered drill works, it uses swappable batteries and there’s a million different ways to charge them, from mains, from the sun, from the car, from another battery, whatever you want.

“Operating a gasoline-powered leaf blower for one hour produces as much volatile organic compounds and NOx as driving a 2017 Toyota Camry from New York City to Orlando, Florida,”

Wow. I think of all the leaf blower persons working full time throughout the state and it must be in the hundreds of thousands. I think unless they try and regulate that, there will be an enormous black market in gas powered leaf blowers that’s going to make some criminal enterprise very wealthy. Would be much better to ban the blowers themselves than the sale of the blowers.

> I think unless they try and regulate that, there will be an enormous black market in gas powered leaf blowers that’s going to make some criminal enterprise very wealthy. Would be much better to ban the blowers themselves than the sale of the blowers.

Banning the use of existing tools must surely be untenable due to the sheer quantity of them in use throughout the state, often by independent landscaping service companies that probably don't have the capital to refit their workforce at once.

They can phase them out e.g. ban them in the morning and evening, ban them in built up areas, ban them in contracts given by the city government.

Once you get some momentum behind it, it'll be like someone smoking in a restaurant, just an obviously unpleasant thing to be doing that was totally normal fot a while.

Many areas have the bans you allude to. The state could easily do the same.

Interesting. This is news to me --> https://geraldmillerlawyer.com/gerald-miller/

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