V2G Technology You Can't Believe In
by Ian R Thorpe
2009-08-29
Politicians don't get it do they?
“Technology will solve the climate change problem” said George W Bush and Tony Blair slavishly echoed his words. President Hopeanchange went one further, “Technology,” said The Obamessiah, "will solve the climate change problem AND lead us out of the recession.” The soaring rhetoric, having soared, seems to be falling somewhat short of making any sense but that is just par for the course for Obama, a man whose vacuous banalities match those of any television preacher or motivational speaker.
Obama’s position is particularly bizarre. So far the man’s political success, rather than resting on any great achievement at lower levels or perceived success in holding any of the offices of state rests solely on the fact that he is not George W. Bush. And yet Barry can’t come up with any better policy to tackle climate change that that offered by the Bush administration..
Like Bush though, Obama has has little Sir Echo in the current British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who shows every sign of a pathetic need for a pat on the head from his American boss than even Blair did.
From the empty words of politicians has been born a new industry, catastrophe capitalism, the business of making money out of the fear and panic about climate change raised by political hyperbole.
So what of these wonderful technologies the politicos promise will emerge to save the planet? So far we have seen proposals for a carbon capture system that will generate more carbon in manufacture and recycling than it can ever capture, a method of generating clean power that will use more dirty energy that it can ever generate clean energy, a landscape covered with windmills that do not generate any electricity when the wind does not blow (anyone notice how still the air has been on many occasions during perios of extremely cold weather over the past few years?) or when the wind blows too strongly. Fortunately with the exception of wind turbines on which billions of pounds, dollars, Euros and Ruritanian spondooliks have already ben wasted these technologies are still on the drawing board and will probably stay there.
Now however we learn of a technology so gobsmackingly stupid and utterly useless it will probably get made, be subsidised by vast amounts of tax money and it’s inventors will trouser £££ billions in taxpayers money and disappear into darkest Monaco or somewhere and scrap metal dealers will get slightly less rich but still rich.
V2G or Vehicle to Grid (don’t you just know it is going to be crap by that txt spk acronym?) is a propulsion system to power electric cars that will make money for its owners goes the hype. Here’s how it works. We will buy electric cars powered by V2G systems, charge them up overnight on cheap rate electricity and during the peak rate hours discharge the batteries putting the electricity back into the grid.
And what happens when you want to drive you car you might well ask> The best electric cars built to date have a range of about 100 miles at best, considerably less if driven around town or in commuting conditions. All that stopping and starting puts a big load on the battery. 100 miles is not very far, many people commute more than that in a day. Most weekend leisure outings involve a round trip of more than 100 miles. A battery driven car with a 100 mile range might just get me up to visit my Dear Old Mum and back so long as traffic was free flowing in both directions on the M6 motorway (yeah right, dream on!) but my sister could not do the trip from her home and back without a recharge even in ideal conditions. Poor Mum. Still as she whiled away the lonely hours in the solitary confinement of her flat she could console herself with the knowledge that her offspring loved their planet if not their parent.
Just to show how profoundly the people pushing this technology have failed to think it through properly, were we all to start using overnight cheap rate electricity to charge our 30 million cars, how long do we imagine it would be before overnight cheap rate became overnight peak rate.
If developing new technologies is our best hope for beating climate change and reversing the economic slowdown and this is the best technologists can come up with you had better get ready for a long recession and a lot more freak weather.
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