Image by Nerijus jakimavičius from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
They want you in an EV so they can use your battery to rescue the unreliable grid they built
There is a desperate need to add billions of dollars worth of batteries to smooth out our volatile grids. As I said last year:
The hapless homeowners will buy the back up battery for the grid and install it in their garage. (Sometimes they might drive it too.)
It’s so much the better if the unwashed masses pay for the batteries themselves, and so it has come to pass. Some academics in Canberra are excited that they finally proved the point and sucked some electricity out of 16 cars at a tight moment in February.
A vehicle-to-grid response: Electric vehicles fed power into Australian grid during blackout, says report
During a major storm event that eventually cut power to tens of thousands of homes, a fleet of electric vehicles (EVs) were able to feed power back into Australia’s electricity grid, according to a new report from The Australian National University (ANU).
These 16 cars provided all of 107 kilowatts for an unspecified length of time.
They let slip just what a drain EV’s will be on the average household.
“Stopping just 6,000 EVs charging would have kept the power on for those 90,000 customers whose power was cut on February 13.
So one EV consumes as much electricity as 15 houses, and we want to add a million to an unreliable grid? Where is all that electricity coming from?
And as Andrew Bolt points out, you might have been charging your car for a reason…
There’s huge bushfires, say. They knock out electricity lines, like the ones that went down and triggered Victoria’s big blackout. Your EV, which you were charging at home, is suddenly drained to save the electricity system. And then the fires approach. Or the floods.
So after they subsidize your EV purchase, and you think you have a good deal, they’ll raise the price of electricity. Then they’ll offer their hostages discounts if they join the scheme and plug in the car every day. But when your car battery depreciates “to landfill”, or your house burns to the ground, you’ll be the one paying the bill.
UPDATE: To clarify — It will be voluntary but only the wealthy will really have the choice… Like air conditioners that the government switches off in our homes on hot days, the unwashed masses will find the “discounts” offered to keep their car plugged in at peak hour will be hard to refuse.
Expensive electricity is not a bug, it’s a feature. Cheap electricity gives power to the people. Expensive electricity gives power to the bureaucrats who control the complicated pricing schemes. The bureaucrats give discounts to encourage certain “patterns of behavior”. The wealthy do what they want.
h/t Bally and MeAgain.
REFERENCE
Bjorn C. P. Sturmberg et al, Vehicle-to-grid response to a frequency contingency in a national grid – successes and shortcomings (2024). DOI: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-4445838/v1