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:

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.

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.

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