SORE Subject

In an aggressive aim to eliminate the fossil fuel pollution of its state’s omnipresent landscape tools — which outnumber its cars — the California legislature passed AB-1346 back in 2021. Enacted at the onset of 2024, the law prohibits the in-state sale of small off-road engines (SOREs) at or below 25 horsepower. Per the golf and landscape industries, tools under said governance include mowers, blowers, string trimmers and chainsaws. The law, it needs to be clarified, prohibits new sales of SOREs, but not use.

Considering that running a gas-powered leaf blower for an hour is estimated to equal the pollution of driving a 2016 Toyota Camry 1,100 miles, the newly implemented law serves as palpable seed for the state’s ambitious aims to phase out gas-powered engines by 2035 and to ultimately achieve carbon neutrality by 2045.

In real time, however, the balance of ambition and application is finding California superintendents rubbing temples as much as plugging in.

The sound (and ails) of silence

The “symphony of the desert” may indeed be on the precipice of a new opus, though the present-day movement is one scored with changes causing some frustration of chord.

Across the golf-heavy spread of the Coachella Valley (known globally as “Palm Springs”), maintaining the region’s 120-course bounty — and oft-attached communal-style living — has long echoed with the ubiquitous hum of teeming, gas-powered engines.

Since the passage of AB-1346, many if not most of the valley’s golf and residential properties are undoubtedly a-scramble when it comes to finding electric replacements for SOREs and/or picking over what inventory remains of such gas-powered tools at or under 25 horsepower.

A more select collection of the region’s properties plugged in with foresight.

“In 2021, when we saw what was happening with this, we were approached by a solar panel company and we decided it was a good time to offset our rising electricity costs,” says Jared Stanek, director of agronomy at the 36 high-end holes of Toscana Country Club in Indian Wells. “So, we put this infrastructure in place and, as a byproduct, I had them pull a whole bunch of new conduits underneath our building for future electric expansion for charging.”

Working off a high-voltage solar charging system, Toscana’s maintenance carts are pulled in during what would be the most expensive time of day (SoCal Edison’s “super on-peak pricing”). In turn, what was once cost-prohibitive is now charging on peak solar generation time.

In concert with maintenance carts, Toscana concurrently acquired a fleet of walk-behind electric greens mowers. “They’re fabulous,” Stanek says. “They perform every bit as well, if not better, than the gas-powered fleet.”

Nearby, across the nine-course public and private spread of PGA WEST in La Quinta, the grounds known as “The Western Home of Golf in America” eye the value of the prescience presented by Stanek. “A lot of us have older shops, so electrical upgrades for the new electric equipment is necessary,” says Brian Sullivan, director of agronomy at PGA WEST.

With electronic prep in-process, PGA WEST’s grounds are seeing the early benefits of electric autonomy. “I’ve got a six-acre lawn that I’m mowing right now with an autonomous mower,” Sullivan adds. “We’ve been running it at night and the cut is unbelievable.”

In the near future, Sullivan is planning to use autonomous mowers across the grounds’ driving ranges.

“I don’t think anybody is looking at it like this is all horrible,” he says of the new law. “If you did, then you’d just be behind the times. I think we’re kind of embracing the electric, and these new technologies.”

Little tools, big issues

While autonomous tools and renewable energy sources are indeed the future of agronomy, the present presents serious ails.

Though Stanek had the foresight of creating a solar-powered charging station for small tools, SOREs have proved an instant sore spot. In concert with his other referenced purchases, he also bought two top-of-the-line electric walk-behind mowers.

“And I got 15 minutes from these mowers,” he says. “That’s also what we’ve come to expect from the hand blowers. You get 15 minutes per charge. It’s been a huge issue. These tools, they’re fine for a homeowners’ setting, but they’re absolutely not commercial-grade tools. These are tools that any commercial landscaper, anybody on a golf course — you need these tools for seven or eight hours a day.”

Stanek adds that the present meager battery lives of SOREs don’t make for a workable alternative. “I was expecting that the functionality of the batteries would be behind the gas (powered), but I had no idea how bad it’d be. I was expecting I’d get around an hour of battery life — that was my worst-case mental scenario. But when we realized it was 15 minutes, that’s not even close. It’s not even feasible.”

Throughout these desert sands and far across the Golden State, such qualms run with the alacrity of 13-stimped greens.

“Superintendents have embraced many pieces of equipment, particularly some of the autonomous mowers, and these have the potential to be game-changing for the golf industry,” says Jeff Jensen, Southwest Regional field staff representative for the GCSAA. “However, superintendents are struggling with some pieces of smaller battery-operated equipment that are not yet fit for intended commercial use. Additionally, some pieces of 25 horsepower-and-under gasoline-powered equipment like aerators, bunker rakes and small spray units are not being produced or readily available in zero-emission alternatives.”

Sullivan agrees: “There’s, of course, so much equipment that we use which is under 25 horsepower: green mowers, aerifiers, sprayers. And there’s nothing really on the market which is more efficient to replace them, so that’s a conundrum.”

Superintendents are ready for the benefits of SOREs, but SOREs aren’t yet ready for superintendents.

“I think all of us are in favor of technologies that are going to be good for the environment and create less noise, but battery technologies have not progressed as much as we would like,” says Christopher Bien, head superintendent at Desert Willow Golf Resort in Palm Desert and president of the Hi-Lo Desert Chapter of the GCSAA. “Even with that being said, I and many others have gone that route with handheld blowers, weed eaters, etc.”

Unfit tools create potentially hazardous risks: “If you go up a large tree with an electric chainsaw, you’re gonna hurt somebody,” Sullivan says. “They’re not strong enough, they’re not gonna last long enough, and the last thing you want is to be in the middle of a cut on a large branch and the equipment isn’t up to the task.”

Stanek is good at planning. He’s also pretty good at math.

“At 15 minutes per charge, when each of these batteries cost $79.99 — and you get two batteries on the blower — how many of the $80 batteries are you going to need?” he asks. “And am I going to then require a diesel generator on everybody’s cart to charge the batteries as they’re going so the guys can continue to work? These are so far behind the expectations of a commercial setting. I can run a blower or string trimmer all day on $5 of gas. And now you want me to have, what, 30 $80 batteries that I have to charge every night? And if you’re the average everyday landscaper, how can you afford these? Are you gonna have $1,000 worth of batteries in your truck that you’ll need to charge every day?”

Sullivan also has a calculator.

“If you’ve got a machine where the engine goes down — and maybe it’s a $15,000 machine with a $500 engine — and there’s no engine in sight,” he says. “We can’t buy that engine under 25 horsepower in California. So that can be a little frustrating.”

As for the $30 million in incentive programs for small engines via the California State Legislature? Yeah … those funds weren’t for golf courses.

“This was a major point of contention for the golf industry and one we fought and failed to obtain,” Jensen says. “We support the creation and funding of product rebate, tax incentive and low-interest loan programs that help offset the cost of new battery-powered equipment purchases — especially when conversion is mandated by law or, when due to regulation, the ability to purchase gasoline-powered alternatives has been restricted or eliminated. The costs of commercial-grade battery-powered equipment can far exceed their gasoline equivalents, with industry research finding that zero-emissions equipment can have an upfront cost of as much as two to four times their gas counterparts.”

Hopes and realities

While all parties concur that California governance has its heart in the proper place, further agreement comes via the belief that the feasibility of both application and marketplace is still a year away, or perhaps even two.

“Superintendents recognize that the green industry will continue to move to lines of zero-emission equipment in the future, and that these lines offer numerous benefits,” Jensen says, “including healthier working environments, lower maintenance costs, reduced noise, reduced environmental impacts and reduced fuel costs.”

And yet, current infrastructure is simply not yet in place for success with SOREs. The tools are not repairable in-house and parts catalogs aren’t available for quick fixes.

“Most of these tools, they can’t be repaired,” Stanek says. “If something goes wrong with one of these blowers or one of these trimmers, there’s a little electric motor inside of them — with no repairable parts. You basically have to trash the whole thing, or you send it back in for warranty — which is what we’ve been doing — and they don’t have the (replaceable) unit. Sometimes they’ll send you out a demo unit to hold you over for a few weeks and then eventually get out the new unit. And you can’t tell me that’s reducing our carbon emissions, when they basically just throw an entire blower in the dump.”

Such marketplace unreadiness resulted in a 2024 scramble for what SOREs remained for sale, along with the concurrent need to preserve the small-engine tools superintendents already had in-house.

“We’ve all basically scrambled to get as many gas-powered tools in the shed as we can,” Stanek says. “People have stockpiled like crazy. Once these tools are gone, they’re gone. And then we’ll be forced to come up with a system that works and that’s cost-effective with tools that aren’t viable.”

Balancing the jobs of New vs. Old makes for a delicate dance.

“Getting replacement tools, they’re difficult to find,” Sullivan says. “Our gas golf carts, we need those to tow equipment, because the electrics can’t make it through the whole day — and if those engines go down, so does the piece of equipment. It forces you to have two electric carts to do the job of what one gas vehicle can do.”

The flux of electric and gas, with scales of pros and cons, is occurring in real time.

“As a positive, if an employee can bring an (autonomous) mower out to mow greens and he is free to repair ball marks, rake bunkers and carry out the attention-to-detail tasks automation cannot accomplish, it’s a real win,” Sullivan says. “But it can go the opposite way, too. Say we’ll have the (electric) green sprayer with somebody walking behind with a ‘wield’ in front of the applicator — which isn’t ideal, because then the applicator is walking through the chemical instead of spraying it behind him.”

One could muse that the clouded, present-day SOREs situation could — or indeed will — cause serious issues for a rack-rate track struggling with resources. Might such a dire need for equipment create a black market with desperate superintendents traveling to border states for tools?

“Enforcement of the rule and buying equipment from neighboring states is a very gray area at the present time,” Jensen says. “Technically, California has yet to receive a waiver from the EPA concerning the SORE regulations. It’s been standard practice to implement rules first and secure waivers from the EPA secondly for over 50 years.” In January, the EPA approved the SORE waiver, along with other new environmental rules. “The potential for this to end up in court,” Jensen says, “is very real.”

Judd Spicer is a Palm Desert, California-based writer and senior Golf Course Industry contributor.