(The Epoch Times)—Tesla’s biggest EV Supercharger station in the United States uses diesel power to charge vehicles, according to an energy expert who confirmed that these types of diesel-powered stations are present elsewhere as well.
During an Oct. 6 interview with EpochTV’s “Crossroads” program, energy-related public policy analyst David Blackmon was asked whether Tesla’s Harris Ranch EV charging station in Coalinga, California, runs on diesel power.
“Yeah, in part,” Mr. Blackmon replied. “The San Francisco Chronicle did an exposé on it. They found that this charging station has 98 high-speed Tesla chargers. There’s a diesel-generating plant located behind the Shell station that’s adjacent to the chargers. And it’s providing power.
“People think, I guess they think the power comes from just the sky or something,” he said. “But something has to generate the electricity that enables those chargers to recharge those batteries. And Tesla operates this charging station and decided they needed that diesel generating plant, and they strategically located it behind the Shell station.”
Mr. Blackmon spent 40 years in the oil and gas industry. A senior contributor to Forbes magazine, he writes and comments frequently on energy issues.
Harris Ranch is one of Tesla’s first Supercharger stations. On its website, the Harris Ranch Resort describes the facility as “the world’s largest Tesla Supercharger station.”
When asked whether diesel-powered EV charging stations are common, Mr. Blackmon said that he had personally found one such station at a supermarket in Houston five or six years ago. A grocery store manager told him a diesel generator powered the charger.
“I went [and] looked at it, he took me out there to see it … Every time a car pulled up to recharge, that diesel generator came on and provided the power for it.”
Mr. Blackmon pointed out that the EV industry is going through “a lot of growing pains” and that proper infrastructure to support electric vehicles “just is not there.”
“Tesla’s way out in front of all these other carmakers in the EV space here in the United States, and is doing whatever it needs to do to ensure electricity goes to these chargers so that the drivers in California—it’s the biggest market for Tesla—and their automobiles, they want to make sure they can charge their cars as they’re driving through the Central Valley. And yeah, the diesel generators are doing the job.”
News outlet SFGate, which used to be part of the San Francisco Chronicle, did a story on the diesel-powered Harris Ranch EV charging station last month.
In 2021, Tesla claimed that all its Superchargers would be 100 percent powered by renewable energy by the end of that year. When the outlet contacted Tesla to comment on the Harris Ranch Supercharger’s use of diesel, the company didn’t respond.
At the Harris Ranch Resort, SFGate tried unsuccessfully to use the TezLab app, a free app that can track energy sources used at Tesla Superchargers. A TezLab spokesperson later told the outlet that the energy being used at Harris Ranch consists of a “mix of sources that are attached to the grid.”
“Nearly all Superchargers, homes, businesses, etc., in California are using those same sources of energy, unless they have their own dedicated solar or theoretical energy contracts.”
“Because of how grids work, it’s not really feasible to look at one charger and say, ‘Oh, I’d rather drive another 5 minutes to this one that uses a cleaner source of energy’ since they are very likely on the same grid.”
US Power Grid Challenge
In the interview, Mr. Blackmon was asked whether the power grid would be able to handle the electricity demand coming from increased EV use. During heat waves, California power officials issue alerts asking EV owners not to charge their vehicles in a bid to conserve power.
The power grid issue is a “huge problem,” he said. “And it’s much bigger than people know because right now, we have a crisis in [the] supply of electric transformers for our power grid.”
“Transformers are an integral part of every electricity project in America—around the world, really—and they’re in very short supply. It’s taking up to four years to source new supplies of these transformers. Inventories are very low.”
“And, you know, you can’t expand the grid if you don’t have the equipment to do it with. The federal government is not doing anything to solve this problem,” he said.
In March, IEEE Spectrum, a publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, published a report on EV transition, highlighting the transformer crisis in the context of the U.S. power grid.
Professor Deepak Divan, director of the Center for Distributed Energy at Georgia Tech, estimated that multiple L2 chargers on a single distribution transformer can cut its life from 30–40 years to just three years, according to the report. L2 chargers provide faster charging than the regular L1 chargers supplied to EV buyers at the time of purchase.
Upgrading transformers can be a headache for electric utilities. Costs of transformers have jumped to as much as $20,000 each, from $3,000 to $4,000. As larger transformers may be required to support EVs, many of the 180 million power poles in America would also have to be replaced, pushing up the cost further, the report said.
Some experts argue that the threat to transformers can be minimized by encouraging EV owners to charge during off-peak hours when there is less load on the electric grid. However, the report notes that off-peak charging “may not fully solve” the peak-load problem once EVs become widespread.
“Transformers are passively cooled devices” that are designed to be cooled at night, Mr. Divan said. “When you change the [power] consumption profile by adding several EVs using L2 chargers at night, that transformer is running hot.”
The risk that uncoordinated overnight charging may end up resulting in transformer failure is a cause for concern, especially during summer heat waves.
Utility firms are also staring at high costs to enable EV adoption.
“The rising number of EVs will test the local grid’s reliability at many of the 3,000 electric-distribution utilities in the United States, which themselves own more than 5.5 million miles of power lines. It is estimated that these utilities need $1 trillion in upgrades by 2035,” the report stated.
In addition, to achieve the desired level of reduction in greenhouse gases, fossil fuel energy will need to be replaced by renewable energy, which will add to the cost.
Improvements and replacements to the grid’s 8,000 power-generation units and 600,000 circuit miles of AC transmission lines, as well as 70,000 substations to support increased renewable energy and battery storage, are estimated to cost more than $2.5 trillion by 2035, it said.
In the interview, Mr. Blackmon also pointed to challenges that EV charging will face during disasters such as hurricanes when the power supply is disrupted.
“We’ve been very fortunate in this hurricane season, that we haven’t had a major storm like Hurricane Harvey—[which] comes through and shuts off power across a wide geographical area—this year, and hopefully, we’ll get through this season without that happening.”
“Because honestly, in some areas of the country, it might even be impossible to restore power within months if it gets knocked out, because of this transformer issue.”
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.