Our solar panels kept the fridge running, but we were heating the house with a wood stove (it was very cloudy, so we were getting maybe an hour of sun a day). If we had bidirectional house charging, we could have had warm showers + used the heat pump: We would have been able to fast-charge the car at 100-200kw in town. The house can limp through 20-30 hours on ~ 25kwh, so the charger would charge the house at a few days per hour, including losses from driving to and from town + round tripping through the battery, and also running the house heat pump.
None of the other people around here stayed online. Some propane-dependent people had no electricity for > 2 weeks (with rationing, they managed to keep their generators online for about a week, and PG&E took three weeks to fix their lines).
This was in the outskirts of Silicon Valley, so better-than-puerto-rico infrastructure, but only just.
[–] ryandrake 1 day ago
[–] testing22321 1 day ago
Like the storm surge walls at Fukushima, all infrastructure is designed with a certain size of storm or event in mind based on historical averages and outliers.
Climate change is throwing all that to shit.
Your comment says plain and clear you’ve never lived through a “once in 100 years” level event more than once in a decade, and you don’t realize how much it would cost to upgrade what we’ve spent ~100 years building.
It’s trillions, just to get started.
I also wonder if you’d be fine with increasing taxes to pay for all that, or if you already complain about “high taxes”
We are far away from, but slowly approaching, Mad Max levels of institutional failure, and everyone seems to treat it as normal and unavoidable.