EV owner fined $500 for stealing electricity in Polestar 2
Thieving electricity to run your EV is not exactly an abhorrent crime, but if you get caught doing it, the monetary penalty could wipe out any potential gains by Grand Theft EV. Here’s what happened…
The WA driver of a fake Swedish Chinese Polestar 2 has been fined 500 Australian dollars for sticking his plug into the wrong box. We've all been there.
By the way, $500 is not even close to the biggest fine you can get in Australia for an EV misdemeanor.
Our anti-hero in this story was driving a Polestar to some random derelict corner of in Western Australia and he goes and plugs the car into a meter box that he just sees on the side of a road on a vacant block of land.
This is like the meter box connected to your house, only without the house. He just stops and whips out the standard charger, and plugs her in. I don't know how long he was there for, but unfortunately he was caught on CCTV by the owner - and the cops were alerted.
One thing led to another and here we are - that’s a $500 fine - which is rather a lot considering the loot he got out of it. But nobody can escape the long arm of The Power Police, the Electron Squad, The Fixated Amp-hour Unit.
Commander Coulomb took to the Facebooks to caution the public that electricity theft is not a victimless crime, that you can't just take advantage of any socket you come across regardless of how wide open, no matter how bona fide it may be. Enough is enough, no means no.
The police were so impossibly level-headed about this kind of thing.
I do wonder though: who installs a surveillance camera in the absolute boonies, looking down at their meter box? That's got to be among the most uninteresting video footage ever recorded. Can you imagine? It's gotta be roughly as compelling as the average politician’s press conference.
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Important: This is only an allegation, the person has not been convicted of theft and I'm not making any allegation whatsoever that he or she is guilty.
So let's just say hypothetically, in a similar parallel universe, let's run the basic economics of this alleged Grand Theft Electron. What do you get out of it?
You get the standard charger which is designed to go in a 10 amp GPO, so let's assume it draws 10 amps, which is about 2.5 KvA. Let's say you've got some spare time that day to hatch your cunning plan. You're going to be there for about eight hours, at 2.5 KvA is about 20 kilowatt-hours.
Over in the West, if it's peak electricity you'll be paying 50 cents per kilowatt-hour, so that's $10 of free electricity. The opportunity cost is a bit of a problem though, I'd suggest, because you've just blown eight hours to get a quarter of a full battery charge and the total benefit to you in monetary terms is $10. Hardly seems worth it.
It’s not the same as knocking over Fort Knox is it?
With a $500 fine, if we break that down into equivalent electricity, that's like 1000 kilowatt-hours or a megawatt hour of electricity at peak rates. That's a fair bit of electricity.
$500 also buys you about 250 litres of petrol.
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If you hypothetically pay peak rates for that 1000 kilowatt-hours of electricity, that's the same as 13 recharges of your Polestar 2, which is about 77 or 78 kilowatt-hour, or 6240 kilometers of range, according to the WLTP test for that car.
So in the real world, that's probably enough electrons to get you from Perth to Sydney, even though you can't carry them all at once, clearly.
The conclusion: crime really doesn't pay.
Watch the full report above to see exactly how much you could be fined in other states for stealing electricity in your EV.
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