Electric cars are already causing some grid failures in Australia

EV ownership in Australia is only 1 car in 4,000 of all our cars on the road. Yet already they are causing streets to go black, and possibly blowing transformers which need replacing “more often”:

Electric cars are already causing some grid failures

Robert Gottliebsen, The Australian

It’s a crisis that has been concealed from the vast majority of the population …

The danger really came home to me when I met up with an affluent, long-time Melbourne acquaintance who lives in a street where there are six Tesla cars.

When they all try to charge their batteries at the same time, the power goes out in the street because the grid fails. Sometimes it fails when only three or four of them try to charge at the same time.

He talks about intermittent power causing “choppy” electron flows which make transformers hotter:

To my horror I discovered that cities like Melbourne and Sydney are in danger of either experiencing explosions or even a complete collapse of the system.

Gottliebsen went on to find a solution (apart from the obvious one of “no rush to EV’s”). He found […]