2y ago

Australian woman used her BYD electric car to power her son's dialysis machine during a blackout

www.businessinsider.com

An Australian woman used her BYD electric car to power her son's dialysis machine during a blackout

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.

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2y ago

BYD Electric Car Becomes Lifeline in Australian Blackout

www.businessinsider.com /byd-electric-car-powers-life-saving-machine-during-blackout-2024-1

16 comments

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.
- 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...
So many Chinese bots lately.
- this bot is a moderator and iirc pulls posts directly from reddit. it might be a Chinese bot that posted it in Reddit, but not on Lemmy.
  
  Thanks for the context. Just seems like there are so many articles about BYD lately.
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Locomotives have done this for small towns. Ships have done this for coastal cities.
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!

16 comments