Andrew Bolt: EV battery plan latest crackpot global warming scheme

The only thing to like about a plan to steal power from EV batteries to save an electricity system wrecked by other warmist schemes is that it punishes those who think they’re saving the planet by buying an electric car.

The only thing to like about the latest crackpot global warming plan is that it punishes people vain enough to think they’re saving the planet by buying an electric car.

The plan – pushed this week by an Australian National University academic and naive reporters at the ABC and The Age – is to steal the power in people’s EV batteries to save an electricity system being wrecked by other warmist schemes.

Oh, and steal it exactly when there’s, say, a bushfire you might be desperate to flee. In your car.

Ha ha ha.

An ANU paper published this week said researchers had got 16 EVs to pump power back into the system when a big storm cut power in Victoria this year to 90,000 homes.

The ABC was as excited as it was ignorant of engineering: “A fleet of just 16 EVs charging across Canberra was able to rebalance the power during a major blackout in Melbourne this year.”

What? The batteries of just 16 cars could save Melbourne from a major blackout? They couldn’t and didn’t.

The only thing to like about the latest crackpot global warming plan is that it punishes people vain enough to think they’re saving the planet by buying an electric car. Picture: iStock

But the ANU paper’s lead author, Dr Bjorn Sturmberg, said, getting another “105,000 vehicles responding in this way would fully cover the backup required for the whole of the ACT and NSW.” For a short burst.

Only Japanese EVs can put electricity back into the system but Sturmberg hopes this will become a standard feature to save an electricity system already so shonky that we’re paying big manufacturers to shut down when there’s not enough power.

Hmm. Intriguing. Until you apply this to the real world.

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.

What will you drive?

There must be an easier way, and Sturmberg’s paper accidentally hits on it. Stop the Albanese government’s push to make us buy electric cars rather than petrol ones.

Sturmberg’s paper notes Victoria’s blackout of 90,000 customers “is equivalent to stopping 6000 EVs charging at 5kW”.

These cars hog that much of our electricity already?

Today we have under 200,000 EVs on our roads. Under the government’s plans, we should have anything up to 2 million EVs by 2030. That’s a hell of a lot of electricity we don’t have.

Is petrol really so bad?