Using EVs to power homes in emergency, EV as batteries.

[MontyFloyd]

Ford has teamed up with Sunrun to enhance home energy management, leveraging the substantial onboard battery capability of the Lightning with Ford Intelligent Backup Power, to give customers the ability to use bidirectional power technology from their all-electric truck to provide energy to their homes during an outage, or to reduce their reliance on the grid when electricity prices are high

Not the first time an EV was engineered to provide power to building, be it emergency or perhaps a get-away cottage.

After the horrible 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that caused the devastating nuclear disaster that crippled east Japan's power grid Nissan quickly created a method to power a house from its recently introduced Nissan Leaf. Recently the item was released in other countries.

I think Tesla should offer some method for eternal power on all cars (110v outlet in frunk?). Word is the Cybertruck will have something, likely a 110v outlet.
Thoughts from the gallery?

 

[jjrandorin]

Thoughts from the gallery?

That there is no incentive for tesla to do this in any way that does not leverage their existing Powerwall infrastructure. I expect that at some point people who have powerwalls (and thus the tesla gateway and permits etc) will be able to ADD their car to an existing powerwall setup.

There is no business reason for tesla to do otherwise. People expect to be able to use their tesla vehicle "instead of" a powerwall, and I am betting that never, ever happens from tesla, unless the company goes out of business and is sold to some other company. Every time this comes up on TMC (this isnt the first or second time), and I say this, usually someone responds with some variation of "yeah but the competition is..." or "yeah but other companies did before..." or some other "yeah but.."

None of that takes into account that "home battery storage" is called "powerwalls" by people at this point the same way that "Petroleum jelly" is called "Vaseline", or "Cola" is called "Coke" (or in some places "EV" is called "Tesla"). Tesla has the leading home storage battery solution and would be silly from a business sense to do anything that didnt leverage that along with their cars, so people will never be able to plug "A tesla" into their home to power it, unless they already have powerwalls.

What I am betting will happen is what I said above, that people with powerwalls will at some point have an additional perk of adding those to existing powerwall storage.

Note that is a completely different discussion than "external power on all cars (120v outlet in frunk)" statement. I do think something like that may happen sooner or later on tesla vehicles irregardless of the "V2H" (vehicle 2 home) that is the first part of your post.

 

[ThomasD]

How long can the vehicle power your home ? In winter can it power your home heating needs for multiple days?

 

[jjrandorin]

How long can the vehicle power your home ? In winter can it power your home heating needs for multiple days?

No one could ever (ever) answer that with any sort of accuracy at all, because everyones home, heating needs, installed heating, etc etc is different. Whats A week" for one person could be 36 hours for another.

You would look at your electric bill, see what your daily winter electric use is, and subtract that from the battery size.

 

[Empiro]

I can see Tesla eventually being forced into V2G if many other manufacturers offer it, and people start citing lack of that feature as why they purchased something else. However, only the F150 offers true V2G at the moment, and even with that, you need to spend thousands of dollars to get your house ready for it. I don't know if V2G will ever be a big selling point.

I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla adds a 110v outlet in the future. That has lots of practical uses, and doesn't require the owner to install any special hardware in their house.

 

[MontyFloyd]

Tesla has the leading home storage battery solution and would be silly from a business sense to do anything that didnt leverage that along with their cars

All excellent points, some more items to think of.
I wrote this as something for Emergency use only, but there is a more to this than just a box (search did not result in what I was looking for).

TO refine my thoughts:
What I envisioned was a connection that provided at least 60A of power to run several items like the fridge, floor heaters, lights, fans. Items most needed in an emergency, and a good Heavy Duty (12/3 or 10/3) extension cord will be sufficient to reach the items.
Nothing hard wired in like a power wall. More than what an in car inverter would offer (single 20A connection).

 

[ATPMSD]

This is really not a good idea for anything other than a power outage. Batteries have a limited life and adding cycles to power anything other than the car just shortens the life.

 

[MontyFloyd]

This is really not a good idea for anything other than a power outage. Batteries have a limited life and adding cycles to power anything other than the car just shortens the life.

That is point of this post, in the title

"in emergency"​

 

[ATPMSD]

That is point of this post, in the title

"in emergency"​

Yes, but..you will note comments like using the car instead of a Powerwall above, and there has already be advertising suggesting using an EV battery instead of a seperate battery for homes with Solar. I agree with the Emergency Use angle, so my comment is more of a warning as this moves forward.

 

[SmartElectric]

Jeff Dahn, a foremost expert on lithium battery and funded by Tesla agrees with OP and advocates for V2H or V2G technology to be included with all EV's.
His point (on a recent EV club zoom call where he presented) : the majority of battery factory build outs currently announced are for EV's, with very little for battery storage. Whereas he firmly believes our climate emergency necessitates using these GWH of storage sitting in idle EV's to be used for the grid.

I have a reservation on a F150 Lightning and will absolutely be using it for backup, and will tinker to get V2H working in a more general way if Sunrun doesn't solve that.

 

[MontyFloyd]

Jeff Dahn, a foremost expert on lithium battery and funded by Tesla agrees with OP and advocates for V2H or V2G technology to be included with all EV's.

Link please

And I assume that
V2H is Vehicle 2 House, and G is Grid.

Although I am asking for a "small h" ability, but I see merit for H and G too.

 

[jjrandorin]

Link please

And I assume that
V2H is Vehicle 2 House, and G is Grid.

Although I am asking for a "small h" ability, but I see merit for H and G too.

General usage of those acronyms is V2H = Vehicle to Home, and V2G = Vehicle to Grid, so yeah, Home / House, Grid.

 

[SmartElectric]

Jeff Dahn, a foremost expert on lithium battery and funded by Tesla agrees with OP and advocates for V2H or V2G technology to be included with all EV's.
His point (on a recent EV club zoom call where he presented) : the majority of battery factory build outs currently announced are for EV's, with very little for battery storage. Whereas he firmly believes our climate emergency necessitates using these GWH of storage sitting in idle EV's to be used for the grid.

Link :

 

[cusetownusa]

How long can the vehicle power your home ? In winter can it power your home heating needs for multiple days?

For me, I am assuming it could as we have NG heating. So just need enough electricity to power the blower fan. Can't imagine that would use a lot of electricity. Would love to have V2H ability for the few times a year I am without power for a few hours.

 

[ATPMSD]

Since we have drifted off the “emergency” use question, let me say that I don’t believe we should be using car batteries for solar storage, in fact I feel we should not be installing batteries in homes at all. What is needed is for consumers and utilities to come together to create fair power buy pack process. In this way the consumer is using the power company as their “battery” and making money while at it, and the power company is then able to reduce generation from none-renewable sources, which benefits everyone. Also, once in place, we can swiftly increase solar production since consumers would no longer have to spend money on panels AND batteries, switches, etc.

 

[MontyFloyd]

Since we have drifted off the “emergency” use question, let me say that I don’t believe we should be using car batteries for solar storage, in fact I feel we should not be installing batteries in homes at all. What is needed is for consumers and utilities to come together to create fair power buy pack process. In this way the consumer is using the power company as their “battery” and making money while at it, and the power company is then able to reduce generation from none-renewable sources, which benefits everyone. Also, once in place, we can swiftly increase solar production since consumers would no longer have to spend money on panels AND batteries, switches, etc.

I agree with overall idea, that there are better ways to store electricity and is better to match generation to usage.
The flip side is the policy and ability has a way to go to insure the system is reliable.

Power reliability is not 100%, so some battery backup is a must (in my house on computers and network, and a couple of floor lights). I suspect you also do that.

Going back to Emergency use, it would be easy to add V4E (Vehicle For Emergency) power tap, and as @cusetownusa suggested the heater system is indeed 110v @ 15A, so a heavy duty 10/3 extension cable and a plug will be enough.

 

[ATPMSD]

Power reliability is not 100%, so some battery backup is a must (in my house on computers and network, and a couple of floor lights). I suspect you also do that.

Yep, I have the important stuff on UPS batteries. The V2H is an interesting concept, but I would weight that against a small generator. Also, a generator is easy to refill with gas for a lengthly outage. And if I was in a location with lots of outages, I would install a natural gas powered standby generator.

 

[MontyFloyd]

And if I was in a location with lots of outages, I would install a natural gas powered standby generator.

Depending on outage mode, so would I.

Few but long: Fuel generator
Many but short: PowerWall or Genrack
Infrequent and short: couple of UPS (and 2 liters of ice in freezer)

Oh, and many and long: Solar, wind, PowerWall, axe, fireplace, bow and arrow (eg: middle of nowhere. )

 

[roblab]

Our power (PG&E) goes off All. The. Time. for little or no reason, and without warning. This is why there are THREE power walls just outside my door. With them, I never even know if there's a temporary outage. Sometimes there's a blip, but as it connects in 1/300th of a second, sometimes there's not even that. My computers have never complained. And I can run for days while my neighbors' houses are dark. I don't know what they do, though I've heard they just sit in the dark or go to a motel. That last option gets expensive as this is Napa Valley and tourist prices are the norm.

This idea of using the car's battery is scary. Let's say your power has been out for a day or two. Sure, You need to have your Fridge and Freezer running. Oh, and maybe the TV and a couple of lights. Your battery will supply all that and more, until all of a sudden you're down to where you can barely make it to the Supercharger (30 miles away for me) or not at all. My well pumps and my septic tank also need to run now and then.

I have solar. Even in winter, they keep my batteries powered. As solar isn't very useful at night or on cloudy days, battery backup is essential. But I'm not going to drain my car. We also have fires where I live, so with that combination, I'm going to want to be able to evacuate quickly (which we've done more than once).

No. I'm not using my car's battery. A Powerwall costs WAY less than the car, and if you can afford the car you can spring for the battery and connecting hardware.

As to "a small generator", Please! They barely give you enough to run the lights, much less the refrigerator and freezer, plus they're noisy and you "get" to go out at bed time and refill the tank so your neighbors won't miss listening to it running all night.

 

[jabloomf1230]

Somebody should build a cheap generator that you drive your car onto (like a dynamometer) and the spinning wheels provides emergency power. Actually they have inverter kits, but that's not the same:

CarGenerator

CarGenerator

www.cargenerator.com

The whole idea is dumb from an engineering standpoint because it would be easier to have a two way connection with the cars charge port and a regulator attached to the house power panel. But since Tesla doesn't want to do that a non-invasive approach would also work.