Ranger from the North

Ed Morrissey:

Does anyone see the problem here? California’s power grid is destabilizing for a number of reasons, mainly from nonsensical and hypocritical public policies. Chief among those are (a) a refusal to use scalable power sources (oil, gas, coal, nuclear) for demand at current levels, and (b) forcing Californians to transfer their vehicles to the grid rather than use gasoline for independent power, thus escalating demand on the grid dramatically.

This proposal doesn’t solve either of those problems. 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.”

Also,

This proposal would cost consumers more, shorten the lives of their already-too-expensive vehicles, with the only benefit to consumers being a refund for power they bought to charge the car the first time — which they would have to spend again to charge it after PG&E drains it. I’d bet that consumers won’t even get a full refund for that power use, and that PG&E ends up profiting from the charge/discharge/recharge cycle. Amazingly, neither Bloomberg nor ABC7 even thinks about that issue, let alone investigates it to any extent at all. Bloomberg just passes along the happy talk about A Billion Dollars In Savings!! without wondering how consumers will use their cars without buying the same power twice with those “savings” — and likely more.

# posted by Ranger @ 9:13 PM