Calif. Moves To Siphon Your EV’s Battery To Power Its Grid

State legislators in Democrat-run California are looking to pass a law that will make it easy for the power company (PG&E) to steal energy from your electric car battery.

The idea is this: when California’s third-world electric grid needs extra juice, the power company will simply suck that juice straight from your electric car battery. [emphasis, links added]

This is possible due to what’s known as “bi-directional” charging, which was originally conceived as a way to use your electric car as an emergency generator in the event of a power outage, which is a nifty idea.

Naturally, Democrats and PG&E only see a way to use this technology to further their evil designs:

“California’s power grid will have to expand in order to meet the demand for more energy. PG&E’s CEO Patricia Poppe has come up with an “unconventional” idea, using electric cars to send excess power back to the grid to prevent blackouts.”

We need to stop here and discuss the word “expand.” If I buy groceries, put some of those groceries in the refrigerator, and then go back later to retrieve those refrigerated groceries, did I “expand” my groceries? Obviously not.

“Lawmakers in Sacramento are helping to move things along,” the report says. “For example, Senate Bill 233 would make bi-directional charging mandatory for all new electric vehicles.”

In fact, San Diego already has a “pilot program with school buses using bi-directional charging that feeds into the grid at the end of the day.”

“It’s a gigantic unharnessed, untapped power source that can be used. Most vehicles are sitting parked, unused 95 percent of the time,” Kurt Johnson of the Climate Center said. He adds that “125 plus vehicle-to-grid projects are going on globally.”

This does not create even one extra kilowatt of power.

All it does is drain your car battery’s power, which is the power you are going to have to put right back into that battery.

And how exactly will the grid remain stable when millions of electric vehicle owners are all in a panic charging their cars at 6:30 a.m. so they can get to work?

Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey explains, “It’s the ultimate in authoritarian redistribution — no real production, and lots of opportunity for losses and scarcity rationing”:

It instead creates a kind of three-card Monty with the grid — shifting power to the vehicles, and then pulling it back when the state decides to apply it elsewhere. It’s only an illusion of a solution; no additional power gets created. PG&E and the state would simply confiscate that power for their own uses as they see fit. Technically, the grid would operate more efficiently if it never charged the EVs at all, considering the inevitable power losses that would take place in regional “bidirectional charging.”

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There’s nothing wrong with owning an EV if you choose to do so. This, however, isn’t a choice. California is forcing its citizens into EVs, mandating the end of gasoline-powered personal vehicle sales in the next decade, and is already planning to exploit its monopoly on vehicle energy for its own ends. This proposal in particular exploits that monopoly to cover up the insane and destructive energy policies of the Democrat government monopoly in Sacramento. Internal combustion vehicles and their decentralized, independent power sourcing are still the best choice for freedom — which is why California Democrats want to eradicate them.

And it’s not as if charging your vehicle at home tops your tank. For every hour you charge at home from a standard outlet, all you gain is two to four miles of range.

Even if you purchase Tesla’s handy-dandy adaptor that pulls 40 amps, you might get 30 to 40 miles of charge per hour, but what good is that if the electric company steals it?

What if you need 70 miles of range per day? Do you have two free hours in the morning to refresh your charge? Do you really want to hit the California highway system with only 60 to 80 miles of charge?

Californians are so stupid they are voting for politicians who would propose this plan before they would propose something as radical as, say, building new power plants.

And what do these idiots think powers their precious electric cars? Where do they think that electricity comes from? Most of it comes from burning coal. These are not electric-powered cars. These are coal-fired cars.

Top photo by Ernest Ojeh on Unsplash

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