this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
354 points (94.0% liked)

Technology

60085 readers
4760 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] aeronmelon 37 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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 16 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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 11 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] DanglingFury 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

One answer could be to croudsource it. A mesh network of generative and storage nodes, like someone with solar and a home battery, but large enough to backfeed as needed. Perhaps on an hoa/neighborhood scale. If it could be incentivizes and achieved without undercutting the grid then it could eliminate the need for peaker plants

[–] RememberTheApollo 1 points 11 months ago

That would be helpful, however knowing people they’d unplug their shared car battery and save it because “me first.”

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Depends on the grid. If the lines and transformers are already used close to their limit, more smaller buffer batteries and smaller solar installations, closer to the user, could be more efficient and not require grid adjustments. The closet to the user, the less grid adjustments are needed.

Industrial roof solar should be standard in any new building by now. Companies need the power in the day and it can be used without even needing to use the grid.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 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 11 points 11 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.