A mother used her EV to power her son’s dialysis machine amid storms and a blackout | Electric vehicles with bidirectional charging can be life-saving, especially in times of power cuts and natural…::Electric vehicles with bidirectional charging can be life-saving, especially in times of power cuts and natural disasters.
Forget just cars, cities should have battery stations all over town for whatever emergency reason. During a network outage, they just take your credit card on faith and settle accounts once the bank networks are up again.
Small scale power generation and storage should be the future.
It’s a fuckton cheaper to have 1000MW batteries than one huge 1GW battery.
Better for reliability too.
Maybe. But you gotta factor in maintenance and replacement costs. There’s a reason consolidation happens, and that’s because it’s cheaper to maintain one big thing with fewer people than to keep a system operational that has lot and lots of little parts.
I agree with you, a distributed system with more failsafes and backups seems like a far better idea for infrastructure continuity and security, but business doesn’t see it that way.
One answer could be to croudsource it. A mesh network of generative and storage nodes, like someone with solar and a home battery, but large enough to backfeed as needed. Perhaps on an hoa/neighborhood scale. If it could be incentivizes and achieved without undercutting the grid then it could eliminate the need for peaker plants
That would be helpful, however knowing people they’d unplug their shared car battery and save it because “me first.”
If the storm took down the utility pole 3 blocks away you’re not getting city’s batteries to help you through. There’s a certain charm to distributing reasonably the power storage.
People use electricity generator in those situations too.
The difference is that a generator you might use every two years is likely to fail when you need it unless you carefully maintain it regularly.
You use your car every day, you’ll notice if it breaks and take care of it immediately.
My generator tests itself once a week, automatically cuts over during an outage, and costs ~$200 a year for scheduled maintenance that I can’t be arsed to do anymore at this stage of my life. Generators don’t have to be a huge headache.
How much did you pay for a fancy generator like that?
You use your car every day
Not everyone lives in North America mate
I don’t live in NA either and work from home. I still use my car more often than a theoretical generator
Dialysis machine requires special prepping of course, but without such requirements I feel ok with a few flashlights and USB power banks. Plus warm blankets. I can get by without my vacuum cleaner or microwave til the power comes back.
BYD does what Tesladon’t
As much as I like electric cars this could be done with pretty much any petrol or diesel car with an inverter.
Would still be a little difficult for people living in apartments. I always think about this when it comes to EVs, and owning “dumb” cars and maintaining them yourself, which I would like to do. My apartment complex has 3 or 4 EV chargers, which are assigned. So you would have to rent the apartment that comes with the EV spot, which I’m sure makes the rent go up by far more than it’s worth. And no way is there room to work on your own car within the assigned spaces. No guest parking either. I guess it’s just more stuff to add to the “cycle of poverty” list
