To make EV’s our battery bandaid for a wounded grid we need another $10b in inverters

EV towing a trailer load of cash

By Jo Nova

The government has this hope that homeowners can be tricked into paying for the batteries (in the form of EVs) that the wind and solar industry need to make their useless random energy into something reliable. Now comes the news that not only are batteries hazardous fire risks and expensive themselves, but to connect to our grid in a two way arrangement we need to spend $3,000 dollars per household (or maybe $10,000) to buy the bit of equipment that makes this work. Not to mention adding another million gigawatts of generation so the cars can be charged in the first place.

Remember in the end, we are not buying EV’s because they go further, cost less, or are more convenient, we’re buying them because we want to stop storms in 100 years.

How many nice weather days will I get in 2100AD for that $3,000 inverter?

Household EV infrastructure could cost as much as $10bn, inquiry told

By Natasha Schmidt, The Australian

Interim Director of Monash Energy Institute, Roger Dargaville, said powering EVs in just one million households could cost as much as $10bn in power inverters.

Professor Dargaville said such inverters, unlike home batteries such as Tesla’s Powerwall, would allow EV drivers to recontribute power into the grid.

“That piece of infrastructure costs about $10,000 at the moment, and if you have a million vehicles sometime in the future trying to do this that’s $10bn,” he said.

Prof Dargaville hopes that mass production might reduce the cost to $3,000 each if we are lucky. (Mass money printing and inflation will probably prevent that.)

Historians will look back on this era and describe it as a case study in corruption and mass delusion. The great capitalist free market of Adam Smith exists only in limited pockets that masquerade as “free choice”.

 

 

10 out of 10 based on 93 ratings

54 comments to To make EV’s our battery bandaid for a wounded grid we need another $10b in inverters

  • #
    Will

    Marat/Sade all over again: the lunatics are running the asylum and only the sane can see it, that is, IFF, they actually bother to look

    310

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    John Connor II

    It all reminds me of those fake free energy devices where the motor drives the generator which powers the motor.
    It’ll all end in tears.
    We know this because brainless pollies are behind it.

    280

    • #
      Sceptical Sam

      John,
      The people get the governments they deserve.
      “Brainless pollies” are elected in a democratic society by the voters.
      Vote ’em in; vote ’em out.
      Suffer until the majority wakes up.
      Ain’t democracy grand.

      320

      • #
        Gerry, England

        Depends on whether you are given a choice at the ballot box – not to mention if the votes genuinely cast are not trumped by fake votes once the Democrats know how many they need to run through the machines in the days after the election – with your parties having all become members of the Uniparty. In the UK the socialist Tories wanted to crash everything by 2035 while Labour want to do it by 2030.

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    • #
      Will

      “Brainless Pollies” advised by “financially aware” pseudo-omniscient bureaucrats, all of whom have nice sinecures with wonderful salaries, super and medical funds, and who have NEVER been voted in to hold such power, who pose as “experts” on the problem at hand (remember the definition of an “expert”?) and whose bias, banks accounts and contacts with “donors” needs dire assessment to see just who is influencing them and to what degree.

      Do note the recent TGA denial (Source available but I do not wish to be moderated again) that there was any DNA contamination in any of the pushed vaxxines despite overwhelming evidence of such.

      OT I know but I had to say it as no one else wants to and it applies to EVERYTHING that they and the “pollies” touch.

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    • #
      oebele bruinsma

      Indeed, idiocy in full swing.

      80

    • #
      Bruce

      This is “grid-feed, roof-top solar” all over again. But, with even less actual science and engineering.

      And, it gets “better”:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZ-EgYLYSjY

      50

  • #
    Stevo

    I still don’t see this working
    High voltage lines distribute power to transformers which then distribute lower voltage to our homes. As far as I know power only runs one way through these transformers and any power coming from homes(solar/ev battery) can only be used within the homes hooked up to that transformer?

    151

    • #
      Graeme4

      As Callide found out, power can also run backwards, with disastrous consequences. Power runs wherever it wants to, given the chance. That’s how our home solar exports back into the grid.

      120

    • #
      Simon Thompson M.B. B.S.

      Transformers are bidirectional- they work with alternating current. The inverters have to turn say 600 V of direct current into alternating current synchronised to the grid at 240 V AC. There are losses. Almost all inverters do NOT allow local use of power if the grid goes down so solar systems shut down. This is to prevent the linesman fixing the problem being zapped.

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      • #
        Chad

        …. As far as I know power only runs one way through these transformers and any power coming from homes(solar/ev battery) can only be used within the homes hooked up to that transformer?
        ……
        Transformers are bidirectional- they work with alternating current……
        …… To reverse the power flow in a local transformer you need to raise the voltage on the household side. You can only raise it a little before you reach the allowed limit and start blowing up all your connected devices…….

        This issue comes up every time FIT is discussed, wiyth opposing views as to if a 240v domestic “feed in” can actually be effective and useable anywhere back upstrean behind the 11kv, 66kv…132kv, transformers .
        Is there some way we can agree a definitive answer on this point ?
        ….with references !

        30

    • #
      Leo G

      IT should work but will increase phase imbalance at the local distribution transformer. So distribution transformers may need larger neutral conductors or household inverters may need to be three phase.
      Where would we be without copper?

      140

    • #
      Red

      Transformers are bi directional. To reverse the power flow in a local transformer you need to raise the voltage on the household side. You can only raise it a little before you reach the allowed limit and start blowing up all your connected devices. This means that essentially all rooftop solar power is used locally. To overcome this limitation you can replace all end of line local transformers with much more expensive auto tapping variants that can vary the turns ratio with the end result that you can send significantly more power further back into the grid. The current grid is not designed for power flow in both directions but could be designed to do so at great expense, higher maintenance and reduced reliability. Politicians need to get out of the electrical power business and stick to crawling under snake’s bellies.

      140

  • #
    robert rosicka

    Every time I think the government has hit peak stupidity they lower the bar .

    260

    • #
      Curious George

      It is a careful plan. First, outlaw fossil fuels. Second, force electric vehicles to support the grid at any time – don’t even think of driving them. Enjoy the free renewable electricity.

      150

  • #
    Old Goat

    The logical conclusion to this is that all EV owners will be required to support the grid if they want access. Same for all the people who have installed batteries . When you look at how effortless it was for lockdowns and universal vaccination, the virtue signaling EV owners will insist on it . A bit like turkeys voting for Christmas…

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    • #

      Old Goat, don’t forget, just like airconditioners in QLD, they can offer a “discount” for people who guarantee they will plug in at peak time. That way the rich can ignore it, and only the poor will have to plug in.

      190

      • #
        Pauly

        It becomes even more machiavellian when you consider the issue of curtailment – the ability to turn off excess renewable energy when it is not needed. This already happens to large renewable generators:
        https://wattclarity.com.au/articles/2024/03/keeping-up-with-the-curtailment-3-7twh-of-semi-scheduled-economic-and-network-curtailment-estimated-in-2023/

        As this article points out, there are generally three reasons for curtailment:
        1. economic – mostly to do with negative wholesale prices, because this means the generator is losing money.
        2. network constraints – because our grid has not been designed for distributed renewable energy generators in remote locations, and the capacity of critical transmission lines is limited.
        3. grid security – to maintain a minimum amount of synchronous generation in the grid to limit grid instability in voltage and frequency.

        The problem is that rooftop solar PV feed-in is unmanaged on our grid. Meaning it is not metered, it does not participate in the market, and it cannot be easily curtailed for any reason! AEMO’s answer is that all rooftop solar PV installations need to come with a smart meter, allowing them to determine when all that solar PV feed-in occurs, and to turn it off when it is unneeded.

        Don’t have a smart meter at the moment? Don’t worry! State governments will change the legislation to mandate their fitment, and home owners will be required to pay!

        Those smart inverters will also allow AEMO to control domestic electrical appliances: remotely turning off your air conditioner on hot days and remotely turning off your electric heating on cold nights. The pitch for smart inverters will be about home owners getting more visibility of their electricity consumption, but in reality, it exposes that same information to organisations that you have no commercial relationship with!

        And people are forgetting about their home battery installation as well. The grid operators won’t discriminate. That’s the downside of accepting subsidies from governments – that “free money” now has strings attached.

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  • #
    Honk R Smith

    ‘Historians will look back on this era and describe it as a case study in corruption and mass delusion. The great capitalist free market of Adam Smith exists only in limited pockets that masquerade as “free choice”.’

    There’s a lot in this closing sentence.
    The Cold War ‘victory’ over Soviet Communism, is muted by the Richard Nixon China strategy.
    Initiating the evolution of a new mutant economic creature … Global Corporate Capitalism.

    Global Corporate Capitalism is barely disguised fash ism.

    An alliance of government and corporate powers birthed a pre-planned social reorganization and named the baby ‘Pandemic’.
    Global Corporate Capitalism with CCP social control.

    This absurd battery scheme can only exist under this condition.
    It is not even intended to ‘work’.
    It only ‘works’ as a social rule, like making every student wear Mao fatigues.
    Just the latest push on the Overton Window.

    Adam Smith was nation state based capitalism and both a precursor and attribute of political freedom.
    Global Corporate Capitalism has evolved is to erode nation state citizen liberty protections with the intent to produce a new social and legal order.

    The fundamental propaganda fraud that this new order of totalitarians used for the blitzkrieg is ‘Climate Change’.

    History is written by the victors.
    The current blitzkriegers have a Wikipedia Sturmgruppen.

    210

  • #
    James Murphy

    it makes the nuclear submarines look cheap by comparison…

    90

  • #
    Mike Jonas

    So ….. Say I buy an EV today, put it on charge overnight so that I can use it tomorrow, and then find next morning that the government has drained the battery. Brilliant.

    230

    • #
      Hivemind

      “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” – Abraham Lincoln

      “If I can fool some of the people some of the time, that’s enough for me” – P.T. Barnum

      150

  • #
    Neville

    None of their lunacy will make the slightest difference to the climate by 2100, just ask the NON OECD countries as they build hundreds more coal fired plants, while the weakened OECD countries struggle with batteries.
    But I’m still waiting for our MSM, pollies and so called scientists etc to wake up.
    Who can say if they’ll ever wake up?

    180

  • #
    Gerry, England

    If you take Net Zero to its logical conclusion, nobody will be able to afford a battery car, nobody would be able to afford to go anywhere anyway, and there would be nowhere left for anyone to go.

    150

  • #
    pcourtney

    Ahhh, so volume production will bring costs down. Greens think that because it works in other fields, it can’t fail here. Didn’t wind marketers tell us that would drive down cost of wind mills?

    60

    • #
      Hanrahan

      Volume production only reduces costs on NEW technology. After a few years technology becomes a commodity and volume merely keeps you competitive.

      Case study: The lead/acid 12 V battery in your car is made by thousands of highly competitive companies. Bought one lately? They ain’t cheap.

      80

      • #
        OldOzzie

        Harahan – Case study: The lead/acid 12 V battery in your car is made by thousands of highly competitive companies. Bought one lately? They ain’t cheap.

        And they don’t last long – Son yesterday shamed NRMA Batteries into replacing Diesel Ute 2 year old NRMA Battery with 3 year Warranty

        Had been trickle charging using Ctek Battery Charger, but was not taking charge

        NRMA tried to say as Ute had been idle for 3 months, with modern electronics, they were draining faster than Ctek could charge.

        Son pointed out that the Original Battery had lasted 5 years, and they had left it parked in Ski Train car park for 2 months during Ski Season and it did not drain – started perfectly when they came back to return to Sydney.

        30

    • #
      Lee

      Pcourtney, these are the clueless sort of people who think that if 100 wind turbines don’t work on a wind-less day, 1,000 will work!

      30

      • #
        Yarpos

        Well, you know, the wind is always blowing somewhere and power is easily transmitted anywhere so of course the answer is more windmills.

        30

        • #

          “power is easily transmitted anywhere”
          Do you, by any chance, have shares in copper mines?
          Lots of wires needed … lots of copper … lots of big diesel mining machinery …

          Auto

          10

  • #
    Neville

    The data proves conclusively that there’s no dangerous climate change or clueless Biden’s existential threat, so why do we continue with this delusional death wish?
    And when will the people wake up and change their vote?

    120

  • #
    Tel

    That piece of infrastructure costs about $10,000 at the moment …

    That’s weird … because solar inverters are a very similar concept to battery inverters and generally cost a lot less than $10k right now.

    Dunno where this price comes from … but even if the price comes out at $3k or $2.5k might still be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for some households. If you go deep into debt already to buy an EV then you won’t have much to spend on accessories.

    120

  • #
    william x

    Just asking our Australian energy minister…

    A humble engineer would like an answer.

    That extra cycling in an EV battery won’t degrade it.. or will it?

    220

  • #
    Serge Wright

    This hair brained EV solution is a kind of admission that the RE grid solution is an official failure. Since the inception of the RE dream, there has been a long and exhaustive search for the holy grail of cheap storage or dispatchable RE. This initially started with solar thermal, geo-thermal and wave and tidal, all of which were spectacular failures. Then we had batteries which were seen as a new potential holy grail, but the costs were always going up as demand for rare earths went up with production. Who would have guessed ???. In more recent times they advocated green hydrogen, where you lose 80% of the green energy in the process of making the hydrogen and that collapsed last week when Twigged burnt in his own Forrest. So, we’re now left with an EV battery solution and we should all be more than very worried, because taxpayers will probably be forced to foot this massive bill and governments will mandate EVs and ban ICE vehicles and force everyone to connect their EV to the grid or cop a large fine. Basically we’ll be buying a $100,000 EV with our own money every 5-10 years and it’s primary purpose will be to reduce the number of times the grid collapses on calm nights.

    230

  • #
    Hanrahan

    To entice enough mugs to make that work they would need to offer generous FITs.

    Thinks: Wouldn’t it be cheaper to install a diesel generator to harvest the FIT? And your EV would be fully charged in the morning.

    80

  • #
    czechlist

    “Historians will look back …”
    and they may be recording using quill pens

    71

  • #
    Popeye26

    I have this nagging thought that Li-ion batteries will at some stage in the future be banned. I wonder why?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNecvBOdQ

    I do KNOW of certain buildings that ban EVs from underground parking – I wonder why that would be?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFa52Xbh8Us

    I value my life much more than virtue signaling how righteous I am by buying an EV (or scooter) – they are just TOO unpredictable and give NO warning before they self combust.

    Cheers,

    40

  • #
    another ian

    FWIW – Another EV battery plant project on hold

    “Company halts construction of $2.7B battery project in eastern Ontario”

    https://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2024/07/26/hold-your-horses/

    30

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  • #
    another ian

    FWIW

    “I Wrote an Article for Forbes Defending J.D. Vance From Accusations of ‘Climate Denialism’. Forty-Eight Hours Later, Forbes Un-Published the Article and Sacked Me as a Contributor”

    https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/07/26/i-wrote-an-article-for-forbes-defending-j-d-vance-from-accusations-of-climate-denialism-forty-eight-hours-later-forbes-un-published-the-article-and-sacked-me-as-a-contributor/

    60

  • #
    Lawrie

    Even if you bought an EV, would you be silly enough to spend another $10,000 for a smart inverter so you could sell its energy to the grid operator — with a significant round trip loss in-and-out of your EV battery, and more energy lost in the inverter — only to find your EV was sometimes unavailable until you bought some of the energy back again, with another series of energy losses? (Lawrie, Rosanna)

    60

    • #

      And after about three years of ‘helping’ the grid, your EV Battery functions as an XXL fishing weight.
      And you must buy another.

      Bet you’re pleased!

      Auto

      10

  • #
    Philip

    I saw the argument recently that for complete WnS power supply from the grid, we simply need gas power stations to fill in the gaps. “It’s not that hard bigots” he dismissively said.

    Wonder if he’s confused as to why Blackout Bowen is pushing for private car owners to do that role?

    30

  • #
    Neville

    We’re destroying our electricity grids because our world is supposed to be warming at an alarming rate.
    But is that true and why do Aussies seem to face a higher risk of deaths from moderate and extreme cold than Canada and the USA?
    BTW Canada is about the 4th coldest country on Earth and has an average temperature of about minus -3.5C and Australia has an average temperature of + 22 C.
    Here’s OWI Data with some countries’ deaths from different temps.

    https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-temperature-gasparrini

    40

    • #
      Neville

      Sorry just checked and Canada is the third coldest country on earth with an average temperature of minus -4.03 C.
      Here’s the Wiki list of all countries by average tamperature.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_yearly_temperature

      40

    • #
      Philip

      I would guess Australian housing is not made for cold and so we suffer from cold snaps, like English suffer when it hits 25 deg C.

      I’ve lived in a sub-zero winter country but with the central heating you are always warm unless you go outside, and it made me realise I am colder in winter in Australia than I was in the cold climate.

      To this day I don’t like getting out of bed in winter in subtropical Aus, it’s freezing.

      40

      • #
        Neville

        Thanks Phillip and a friend told me the same story when they stayed with their daughter in Sweden for a few weeks during winter.
        They were very cosy inside but were very cold when they ventured outside.
        BTW here’s a map of the USA, Canadian border and they say 50% of Canadians live in that tiny V shaped area east of the Great lakes.
        And anyway at least 70% of Canadians live within about 100 miles of the USA border. I wonder why?
        But Canada’s still not cold enough for the black face Trudeau loony apparently?

        https://cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/gray/3MXWGERKM5ESVJTYY7LPPSZZHM.jpg

        40

  • #
    Jonesy

    Where Prof Dargaville works about sums it up. His CV on Linkedin says it all. Never worked in the real world a single day in his life.

    The entire green energy scam is a research experiment without any understanding or expectation of the outcome. It is an anti-human experiment! The outcome is not for revisiting.

    30

  • #
    Penguinite

    Buying EVs and installing solar panels will significantly drain your financial resources without showing any tangible benefits. This is a vote for the Green Marxists!

    30

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