Filed under: Government/Legal, Safety, Electric
A Glut Of EVs Could Make America’s Shoddy Power Grid Even Worse
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**The increasingly rickety American power grid seems to short out for all sorts of reasons.**
It took just one worker in Yuma, Arizona to plunge millions of people into the dark in the Southwest U.S. and Mexico, a few weeks back. A fluke, perhaps, but not a rarity.
If anything, major power outages are becoming an increasingly serious problem and at precisely the worst time possible - at least if you’re an advocate of electric propulsion. Utility officials concede that it will be increasingly difficult to win over potential battery-car customers if they can’t be certain of a steady supply of electric power.
Yet, that’s precisely what American consumers are facing. In the Detroit suburbs, two months back, a heat wave popped the circuits at a number of sub-stations around the city. It plunged much of my own little community of Pleasant Ridge into the dark for as much as three days. We were lucky. The hurricane and tropical storms that struck the East Coast, from the Carolinas to Maine, just days later, cut power to millions more utility customers, some for weeks.
[HR][/HR][RIGHT] *
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Paul A. Eisenstein is Publisher of *TheDetroitBureau.com](http://www.thedetroitbureau.com/), and a 30-year veteran of the automotive beat. His editorials bring his unique perspective and deep understanding of the auto world to Autoblog readers on a regular basis.[/RIGHT]
[HR][/HR]Continue reading What good is an electric vehicle if there’s no electricity?
What good is an electric vehicle if there’s no electricity? originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 28 Sep 2011 17:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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