Comment by codedokode
5 hours ago
What's good in electric cars? If a large power plant is destroyed how are you going to charge your electric car to escape?
5 hours ago
What's good in electric cars? If a large power plant is destroyed how are you going to charge your electric car to escape?
There is no need of large powerplants. Thats the legacy grid, only to make Warren Buffet rich. New grid (that needs to be built) will have solar panels, BESS + EVs for storage, either off-grid or a small community grid. The new grid is distributed and indestructible.
And your gasoline pump works perfectly fine without power? Or the refineries?
Gasoline is much easier to store (you can keep a reserve in your cellar) and much easier to carry and trade than electricity.
You can store it but not very long, thats btw one reason why its not useful for private people to participate in wholesale/corp market: Even if you would get a small fraction discount for ordering large amount, you cant store that large amount long enough in your basement before it gets unusable (esp. Diesel).
Do you keep gasoline in your cellar? my understanding is that it goes bad relatively fast, so be careful to keep cycling it yearly at least.
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African continent is probably the last place in the world where this is relevant, and they are on track to fix it.
> And your gasoline pump works perfectly fine without power?
Most decent emergency / contingency plans will have the fire department, police or whatever local group show up at one or two designated gas stations to provide power, or require these stations to have on-site emergency power.
If your refinery is taken out, it might take years to rebuild it.
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> Most decent emergency / contingency plans will have the fire department, police or whatever local group show up at one or two designated gas stations to provide power, or require these stations to have on-site emergency power.
this is just nonsense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...
while traveling i got caught up in this. no restaurants, no credit cards working, no grocery stores, no cell connection, no navigation with phone, no gas station. the goddam list goes on. fortunately this was less than 16 hours.
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As someone who has actually lived through multiple major catastrophes where fuel couldn't get delivered for days and electricity was out for days, when the pumps stop working there is no gas. Don't assume the gasoline the police and fire department have will be there for you. It's there for the first responders. They don't have infinite supply. Their supply is extra expensive to handle compared to when things were working. You've now got many thousands of families all trying to get to the two or three operating fuel stations...trust me they're not open to the public! When you're out of gas, you're out of gas.
Meanwhile, those with solar panels not reliant on grid-tie, they can continue to charge their vehicles.
I hope its strictly an American fantasy to think you're driving out of anywhere when something like that happens.
Buy a bicycle.
Following Hurricane Sandy, many were left without power and ultimately even gas was strictly rationed. So it's not out of the ordinary to imagine an event like that happening.
https://www.nj.com/news/2012/11/sandy_gas_ration_12_counties...
This is a good point, Florida EV drivers have already found that EVs are more resilient in a natural disaster because the grid infrastructure supporting the fast chargers comes back online much faster than service is restored to gas stations.
Strictly an American fantasy, that you're left on your own in the face of any kind of disaster.
AFAICT americans are left on their own in the face of any kind of disaster. But, to be fair, in Europe we don't (yet) have the kinds of disasters that they have, so I can't say if europeans are left on their own or not.
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In Phoenix we all live in the shadow of the Palo Verde nuclear generation plant. And once on the radio I heard some pundits discussing contingencies if PV should glitch out and have a life-threatening disaster. And they matter-of-factly said, "you're gonna be walking." And that would be the truth; in a full-scale evacuation of a city like Phoenix, the freeways are not built to accommodate traffic like that, and yours truly has no car anyway, so I would be packing light and walking in the opposite direction, and/or ignoring the orders, to meet whatever fate awaits.
But I bet there would be a lot of bicycle and vehicle theft going on, in such an event.
I know I have a problem with "suspension of disbelief" but I find it always weird in those dystopian movies where they all drive monster trucks on an apparently endless supply of scavenged fuel and spare parts. But I'm positive exactly this Hollywood spirit is what fuels (pun intended) most of those hyper-optimistic answers.
I love disaster movies and they ocassionally lean into the idea of traffic being kind of bad in the event of a disaster. Deep Impact had a protagonist escaping biblical level tsunamis on a dirt bike.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoBikesInTheApoc...
It’s always charged. You plug it in when you get home and it’s ready to go when you leave.
> If a large power plant is destroyed how are you going to charge your electric car to escape?
Solar panels and home battery storage. This is also going to seriously screw over electrical grid and especially powerplant operators... residential will, at least in suburban and rural areas, not need a grid any more except during prolonged phases of low solar yield.
What are you afraid of happening?
This is such a perverse and anxious fear imo
A reasonable scenario might be a cyberattack taking down large portions of the grid for a prolonged time. It's not impossible to achieve something like that, Stuxnet proved the concept of corrupting PLCs driving powerplants ages ago.
Alternatively, even outside a cyberwar scenario, bad weather has been shown to take down power grids for entire regions for days, sometimes weeks.
Meanwhile the oil supply system is immune to outside threats
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_Pipeline_ransomware_a...
https://shippingtelegraph.com/shipping-news/adnoc-reports-15...
https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/08/1168121
> bad weather has been shown to take down power grids for entire regions for days, sometimes weeks
Where I live, we have typhoons which depending on the direction they arrive in can result in all the gas stations being out of gas for 2+ days. Meanwhile the grid keeps on ticking.
If they've taken down large portions of the grid for a prolonged period of time you're also not going to have much gasoline left.
> bad weather has been shown to take down power grids for entire regions for days, sometimes weeks
Once again, as someone who actually lived through those scenarios multiple times, when the gas pumps go down you're usually shit outta luck on getting gas.
When the grid goes down for days, the gas you have in your gas car + any random fuel tanks you have in your garage is what you have. Don't expect anything else unless you plan to take it at gunpoint.
You can have solar panels and batteries right at home. You can't have an oil rig at home.
Are u serious? If ur oil refinery is destroyed how are you going to pump oil to your house?
You can buy it on a black market unlike electricity.
Yes, buy crude on the black market and build your own refinery. Or you can run your own DIY fracking rig in your backyard. There must be some yt videos.
Are you suggesting we plan our global energy infrastructure based on attributes like "how well it fares in a post-apocalyptic barter economy"?
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