From Andrew Bolt at The Herald Sun comes the news that the self-imagined elites who fancy themselves “green” have a new harebrained idea, and that is to steal power back from charging electric vehicles to stabilize a compromised grid. [emphasis, links added]
Here’s the story:
The plan – pushed this week by an Australian National University academic and naive reporters at the ABC and The Age – is to steal the power in people’s EV batteries to save an electricity system being wrecked by other warmist schemes.
…
An ANU paper published this week said researchers had got 16 EVs to pump power back into the system when a big storm cut power in Victoria this year to 90,000 homes.
Now, it’s not like anyone with a brain really expected these progressive “intellectuals” to offer sound policy proposals, but their “plan” is beyond asinine, and Bolt explains why, running through the real-world application of such a scheme:
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.
What will you drive?
What kind of morons would even suggest the solution to staying safe during a serious storm is stranding you and your family in your home when that serious storm comes, especially when you consider that these same people keep telling us that natural disasters are going to worsen.
Progressive liberal morons, that’s who.
Now, aside from the rational concerns over matters that are life and death, what about the other implications?
Imagine charging your car overnight, only to wake up to the realization that the government has snagged the electricity that was yours—hopefully, you didn’t need your vehicle for school drop-off…work…grocery shopping…doctor’s appointments…vacation…or anything else for which people need their personal vehicles.
Or, what happens when you say something on social media that “they” don’t like? De facto house arrest?
I mean, we conservatives already know what it’s like to suffer serious consequences for morally exercising our God-given rights—we lost jobs and pensions, we suffered censorship and bans on social media, we’ve even been arrested, fined, imprisoned, and sometimes even killed.
Do we really trust the government to not abuse their access to, or control over our freedom of movement? (Anyone who does believe that absolutely deserves what’s coming to them.)
Bolt reports that this energy-stealing scheme would only occur under “emergency” circumstances, of course…but how does that Friedrich Hayek quote go? Oh yes, that’s right:
‘Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.
Another way of saying it?
A government that is allowed to break the law during an emergency will create an emergency to break the law.
But, there’s more, because here’s where it gets stupidly comical:
[Lead author] Sturmberg’s paper notes Victoria’s blackout of 90,000 customers ‘is equivalent to stopping 6000 EVs charging at 5kW’.
These cars hog that much of our electricity already?
Today we have under 200,000 EVs on our roads. Under the government’s plans, we should have anything up to 2 million EVs by 2030. That’s a hell of a lot of electricity we don’t have.
The solution to shoring up the energy grid? Eliminate the drains, AKA the electric cars!
Read rest at American Thinker
It’s quite clearly so silly it’s not worth discussing.
That wouldn’t be such a bad idea if the vehicles had some method of generating electricity… imagine paying for parking by plugging in, plugging in at home to power your home, etc.
Of course, if they had some method of generating electricity, they wouldn’t need batteries… they could make do with a supercapacitor bank for those times when demand exceeds generation, or when regenerative braking. That would make the vehicle lighter and cheaper.
But we all know they’re not going to put ICE-driven generators on EVs.
The electricity grid system is not designed to work backwards, draining your BEV battery is only going to keep your neighbours lights on.
Basic understanding of electricity is to compare the supply to that of water, the water pressure is like the voltage and the volume of water (the diameter of the pipe) is the Amperage.
So you have a tank of water in your house, just how are you going to get it up the small pipe into the main water distribution system to supply a shortage 20 miles away, remember you have to overcome the existing water pressure.
Back to electricity, it is an AC system so add in the complications of 3 phase balance and reactive power. IT WILL NOT WORK
Yes, hydraulics and electricity are analogous. Closing a valve or pulling a switch are alike. I have a different take on utilities borrowing your EV’s power. If you accepted taxpayer funded subsidies to buy your Tesla, it becomes OUR Tesla.
The equations for hydraulics, electricity, thermodynamics, etc. are all different forms of the same thing.
In fact, I used a circuit simulator (Falstad.com) to solve a thermodynamics problem.
https://tinyurl.com/yzo8hak9
Great points. Especially the 3-phase electricity in the “big wires”. We go from 115KV (or higher) voltage in the high-power lines that are 3-phase. There are then transformers to drop it to lower and lower voltages with the last ones that provide electricity to our homes send us 2-phase 220v power. And the utilities make sure that it is balanced. But the grid is not set up for feeding 2-phase electricity back into the system.
When I got my engineering degree in the ’80s all engineering majors had to take either Electric Mag Theory or Fluid Flow Dynamics depending on your major. But the math was the same in dealing with the transport of fluid through a pipe or electricity through power lines. At the time I was in an Industrial Engineering degree so the Fluid class was the one I took but after that I switched to Computer and Systems Engineering degree (which I got) but didn’t need to take the EMag class due to the same math in each class.
There are several ‘distributors’ in Australia who now charge if a roof solar system puts power into the grid between 10AM and 3PM. “Put in a battery bank” is the answer given. For what, $10,000 to $20,000?
What’s the bet? If they can drain an EV battery they’ll figure out a way to drain a battery bank as well.
As I stated in another post, some company is likely to develop a black box to go between the home’s wiring and the charger for the EV. The box would immediately isolate the charger when it sensed the current was going in the wrong direction.
It’s DC charging, yes? If so, a simple high-power diode (or bank of diodes, or active diodes if you want a really low forward voltage drop) would do… it lets power flow to the battery, but the charger sees extremely low voltage if it tries to tap the battery to power the grid, so it stops trying. Wrap it up in a neat little male/female plug setup with pass-through wiring for any signalling wires between car and charger, plug the anti-drain device into the car, plug the charger into the anti-drain device, and you’re good to go.
Someone’s losing their Marble please call them bring a net for this one