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Bigger Than Snowy 2.0, Parked in Our Driveways | Ep 338 | Portia Rooney [Re-edited]
09/30/2026
Bigger Than Snowy 2.0, Parked in Our Driveways | Ep 338 | Portia Rooney [Re-edited]
By the early 2030s, the aggregated battery capacity of Australia's EV fleet is expected to exceed Snowy Hydro 2.0. Not approach it — exceed it. And unlike Snowy, it's already being paid for, by people buying cars. Portia Rooney has spent three years working on bidirectional charging in Australia, and went to Europe and China on a Churchill Fellowship to see what everyone else is doing. Her focus is AC vehicle-to-grid, which uses the car's own onboard inverter rather than expensive external hardware — Lego blocks rather than one big dam. We get into why interoperability is the bottleneck rather than the technology, what's actually launched commercially in the Netherlands, what China is running across 30 pilots in nine cities, and why this matters more in the Pacific than anywhere else — where a typhoon takes out one large power station, but not 2,000 cars. One warning worth the whole episode: there are products on the market that will trick a vehicle into discharging without the manufacturer's approval. Don't use them. Portia Rooney is Founder and Director of Batteries in Wheels. Re-edited from Ep 338, first published July 2026. Connect with Sohail Hasnie:
/episode/index/show/energypreneurs/id/43086728
