He used his car as a charger during the power outage: the curious strategy of former minister Marcelo Mena

The forecasts already predicted that last Thursday night a frontal system would arrive in the metropolitan area. Many residents of Santiago went about their normal lives and returned home in the evening to rest. However, At around 12 o’clock an unprecedented wind arose which, in a short time, caused trees to fall, roofs to fly off and caused a huge power outage .

This is how thousands of families in Santiago and throughout Chile found themselves without electricity in the middle of winter. AND The biggest problem was the number of days without supplies: To date, Enel has not managed to restore power to all homes in the RM.

with despair There were people going to charge their cell phones in metro stations, cafes or restaurants. At the same time, cases of elderly people and people with electrical dependencies who had difficult days due to the rain and wind last Friday were presented.

In the absence of responses, Ingenuity was the protagonist of a list of curious solutions.

One of them was that of Former Minister of the Environment, Marcelo Mena who helped his mother-in-law with his car, after the town where he lives (Lo Barnechea) was hit by the wind and he spent five days without electricity.

Is it possible for a vehicle to “save” electricity for a house without electricity?

Marcelo Mena, former environment minister in Michelle Bachelet’s second government, prepared in advance.

Although he did not know that the strong wind would wreak havoc in Santiago, the former authority recounts The third that you have emergency power batteries at home to cope with possible power outages. However, on this occasion, What saved his family member was none other than his electric car.

Her mother-in-law’s house was one of thousands of homes that were left without power for days. Mena was driving her electric SUV Tang, from the BYD car brand, and left it parked in front of the door, as close as possible.

From the same port where the vehicle receives the electrical charge, Mena connected a kind of extension cord, which he then attached to a “sneaker”. This way, inside the house, his loved one could plug in his refrigerator (so as not to waste food) and also turn on the heating to keep the heat in his house.

“The electromobility law allows you to inject energy into the network and get paid. About two years ago, it was published and “When I bought my electric car, I wanted to explore this technology” Mena begins to explain to LT.

Although he clarifies that the vehicle was not purchased for this specific purpose, it is one of the “extras” that the model offers. Because of his interest in this type of energy and because the power outage allowed it, he wanted to experiment and put it to the test.

That’s what he did with his relative’s house, which was left without electricity for five days.

In this sense, he explains that In order to “transport” the electricity from the vehicle to another source, “you have to buy a bidirectional charger and the car has to have this capability. In Chile, V2L technology, which consists of charging a vehicle, is more common.

“This type of energy is attractive, because you can go camping and, with your car, have a portable generator. “It has a super interesting versatility.”

Thanks to this technique, her mother-in-law was able turn on your heating for about ten hours each night, the refrigerator, several lights to have visibility in the afternoon and evening and recharge essential electronic devices, like your cell phone . “It worked well for what was required,” Mena says.

“The battery of an electric car ranges from 30 to 80 kilowatt (kW) hours. Basically, with these 80 kilowatt hours, you can calculate how many hours it works,” the authority explained. That is, with 80 kW hour, 1 kW works 80 hours, 2 kW 40 hours and so on.

In this context, The energy required by certain devices, for example, determines the battery life.

“A refrigerator does not consume more than 300 watts. A light bulb no more than 12 watts. But for a heater that consumes 2,000 watts, the number of hours is considerably reduced.”

In total, with the refrigerator, the lighting and what “a Chilean usually consumes”, The electric car could provide 12 or 13 days of electricity.

“A lot of people have said to me, ‘How ridiculous it is to have an electric car when there’s a power outage.’ And I’ve said to them, ‘We’re framing the problem wrong.’ because in practice, if you have an internal combustion car, it doesn’t give you those kinds of advantages, it doesn’t have that capacity,” former minister Mena told LT.

Although he emphasizes once again that he did not buy his electric vehicle specifically to use it as a generator, he assures that even The kilowatts you transmit to your home via your car are cheaper than those from an electric generator.

“I always propose measures to make another world possible.” And in generalIt is believed that electric vehicles have inaccessible prices, however Mena assures that there are good offers, so much so that “it is cheaper to buy a new car than the used version of the previous year.”

Added to this would be the “change in the tariff structures of the United States and the European Union.” to allow Chile to have access to the cheapest electric cars in the world.

The former authority recalls that an advertisement recently appeared for a DFSK brand car which had a price of 19,990,000 Chilean pesos and which, in addition, was equipped with V2L technology, This is what allows you to have this bonus of being able to use it as a generator, in case of problems.

Another brand of vehicles that feature this same technology are the BYD Tang, Dolphin and Yuan.

“I don’t represent any brand, I simply declare” he adds by way of clarification.

He continues: “Electric cars are becoming more and more competitive today. If we look at a 100% petrol SUV version, we see that its electric version is not only very similar, but can sometimes even be cheaper. This will change radically and will continue to progress, reducing costs.

Sometimes the prices can be $1,000,000 or $2,000,000 more than the gasoline version, but Mena assures that “the return on investment period is less than a year, because you save more than 2 million pesos in fuel and you do not pay a patent.”