Kalifornia has a solution for its energy problems.
Power the electrical grid with… electric cars.
PG&E’s CEO wants electric vehicles to save California’s power grid
Referred to as “vehicle to grid,” two-way charging works by sending power to the grid from an electric vehicle’s battery while the car is parked and plugged in.
-psst- People generally plug their cars in because the battery needs charging.
The idea seems to be similar to grid-tied residential solar power. When your home system is generating more power than you’re currently using, it can feed the excess back to the grid, essentially turning the meter backwards (early systems could literally do that). But instead of a solar power system, the electricty comes from your EV’s battery.
What PG&E is proposing is forcing car owners to be its grid-scale battery plant, instead of investing in actual grid-scale batteries, which saves PG&E lots of money. But to make this work at all (never mind the ineffiencies in generating “renewable” DC power, converting it to AC, conducting it to the charger where it’s converted back to DC and stored in the car batteries; then reversing the whole conversion/transmission process back to the grid), they’d have to mandate that the cars are plugged during peak solar/wind generation periods — even if you need to go somewhere — and then mandate plugging them in again when generation doesn’t meet load demands (brown and black outs)… even if you need to drive somewhere. Just leave the vehicle plugged in and never use it again.
Yep, aside from the cost of the car itself, they want to make you pay for the electricity they force you store store for them and give back. After you bought their batteries for them out of pocket.
If they actually push this, consider buying PG&E stock, because this will be one hell of a money maker for the company.
