A mother used her EV to power her son’s dialysis machine amid storms and a blackout | Electric vehicles with bidirectional charging can be life-saving, especially in times of power cuts and natural…::Electric vehicles with bidirectional charging can be life-saving, especially in times of power cuts and natural disasters.
People use electricity generator in those situations too.
aeronmelon@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Forget just cars, cities should have battery stations all over town for whatever emergency reason. During a network outage, they just take your credit card on faith and settle accounts once the bank networks are up again.
lepinkainen@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Small scale power generation and storage should be the future.
It’s a fuckton cheaper to have 1000MW batteries than one huge 1GW battery.
Better for reliability too.
RememberTheApollo@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Maybe. But you gotta factor in maintenance and replacement costs. There’s a reason consolidation happens, and that’s because it’s cheaper to maintain one big thing with fewer people than to keep a system operational that has lot and lots of little parts.
I agree with you, a distributed system with more failsafes and backups seems like a far better idea for infrastructure continuity and security, but business doesn’t see it that way.
frezik@midwest.social 4 months ago
What? No. Economies of scale don’t work that way. For example, rooftop residential solar is substantially more expensive than a big field of solar, or putting them on top of large industrial buildings. Labor costs hit residential solar much harder.
SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org 4 months ago
It’s pretty common in developing countries. Growing up in India, we had frequent power cuts (not too bad as some other places, maybe like 30 mins in a day). So having backup batteries were pretty common. They’re called inverters colloquially.
We rarely have power cuts nowadays, but they’re still useful during storms and such.
a4ng3l@lemmy.world 4 months ago
If the storm took down the utility pole 3 blocks away you’re not getting city’s batteries to help you through. There’s a certain charm to distributing reasonably the power storage.