- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Australian woman used her BYD electric car to power her son’s dialysis machine during a blackout::A BYD electric car acted as a life-saving power generator during extreme weather in Australia.
You must log in or register to comment.
A BYD electric car acted as a life-saving power generator during extreme weather in Australia.
Batteries are not generators, they’re storage
There is no power being generated
Power can’t be generated anyways, only transformed.
Energy can’t be created, yes. From what I understand though electrical power is generated by conversion of energy, as in the electrical potential did not exist before and after ‘generation’ of power the potential exists.
By that logic a battery is a generator, since it converts chemical potential energy into electricity.
Generators, as typically understood, convert mechanical energy into electricity.
Nah it’s akin to a gas tank. It isn’t generating gasoline, just storing it for later use.
Depends on the level you’re viewing it from.
At a high level, yes, the purpose is basically the same as a gas tank. You put something in (electricity), and take that something back out again later. Though it differs from simple physical storage in that you get slightly less back out than what you stored.
At the level of the actual physics of the component, no. Gas goes into a tank as gas, remains gas in the tank, then come back out as (the same amount of) gas. Electricity goes into a battery, is converted into chemical potential by using that electricity to move ions from one side of the battery to the other, and comes back out by reversing that reaction. There is no electricity in a battery that isn’t charging or discharging.
If instead of a chemical battery it was a mechanical spring that was wound up with an electric motor, and you extracted the power by running it in reverse as a generator from the energy of the spring, is that still storing electricity? A battery is the same, just chemical instead of physical.
Except a battery is converting chemicals and using their reactions to generate electricity. Think of it more like a reservoir with a hydro plant. Your feed in electricity, the hydro plant pumps water in the tank, then during a blackout? The reservoir empties itself through the turbine, re-generating electricity. The cars battery does a similar thing. It takes electricity to change the state of the chemicals, then lets the chemicals react to generate electricity.
Yeah it’s a giant UPS on wheels.
Nice. V2D is a nice use case every ev should provide
A lot of EVs have this built in, some even include V2H so they can backfeed inverted AC to your home via the charger, but it isn’t mentioned anywhere on most product pages (f150 lightning being the worst instance of this; it has a 10kW V2H inverter and there is no mention of that anywhere on its page!)
In the other discussion thread one user noted they even had issues locating a V2H charger at all to purchase, so I guess the manufacturers don’t want to explicitly set up their users for disappointment…
The big problem is V2L/V2H/V2G aren’t a part of the CCS or NACS standards, so each manufacturer is out doing their own thing that doesn’t work with anyone else’s thing. Makes it more expensive (specialized hardware/software), and complicates changes down the road.
Locomotives have done this for small towns. Ships have done this for coastal cities.
deleted
This is the best summary I could come up with:
An Australian woman used her BYD electric car to run her son’s dialysis machine after a huge storm left her without power.
After flash flooding knocked out electricity across southeast Queensland on Christmas Day, Kristy Holmes used her Atto 3, which is made by Chinese EV giant and Tesla rival BYD, to power her 11-year-old son’s dialysis machine, according to a Guardian report.
Holmes told The Guardian that her son Levi, who is waiting to receive a kidney transplant, could have faced life-threatening consequences were it not for the Atto 3’s “vehicle to load” feature, which allows it to charge household appliances with excess power from the car’s battery.
The fact that some EVs are capable of acting as power generators on wheels makes them especially useful during major blackouts caused by extreme weather and natural disasters.
When Hurricane Ian hammered the Florida coast in 2022, Ford saw a 127% increase in the number of people using their F-150 lightning electric pickups as power sources.
Ford CEO Jim Farley posted on X that hurricane-hit drivers were using their trucks to cook meals and power lights.
The original article contains 371 words, the summary contains 185 words. Saved 50%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
