Use Your Car To Power Your House

itwbennett writes "Nissan has developed a system that allows a vehicle to supply electricity to power a house during a power outage or shortage. A prototype of the charging system running on a Nissan Leaf electric car was unveiled in Japan on Tuesday. A two-way charging device that would typically convert the household electricity supply to a voltage suitable for charging the car's battery can be reversed to feed power back into the household circuit."

Comments

Inefficient

[bluefoxlucid]

This looks stupidly inefficient. Either the car takes too god damn much energy to run; it has too huge of a battery; or it can't power a whole house for long.

Re:Inefficient

[bluefoxlucid]

If the system is used regularly, it could also help cut energy bills. By charging the car overnight, when power demand is low and electricity is cheaper, the stored energy in the battery can be released in the daytime when electricity costs are higher.

Let's try this again...

If the system is used regularly, it could also help cut energy bills. By charging the car overnight, when power demand is low and electricity is cheaper, the power demand at night drastically increases above and beyond the power demand during the day, bringing the grid to its knees and driving up night time prices.

Re:Inefficient

[kevinNCSU]

If backup generators were super efficient you'd be using them instead of paying for grid electricity. Efficiency isn't the point, keeping your food from spoiling during a power outage is.

Re:Inefficient

[bluefoxlucid]

Yes but why does it take as much energy as it takes to run your house for 2 days just to drive your all-electric car a few miles?

Re:Inefficient

[cyberchondriac]

I don't think efficiency is their primary goal here. It's chief purpose is to temporarily power a house during an outage. I suppose you could use it regularly but that seems kinda odd.
I'm curious about this though: from TFA: "..is sufficient to power an average Japanese home for about two days" - I wonder how that translates to the "average" US home (assuming there is such a thing).

Re:Inefficient

[rrossman2]

Lets try again:

If used regularly, the batteries in the leaf will need to be replaced a lot sooner than if this system wasn't used at all, which will add a significant price to the setup

Re:Inefficient

[gr8_phk]

This looks stupidly inefficient. Either the car takes too god damn much energy to run; it has too huge of a battery; or it can't power a whole house for long.

Dude, it's an electric car. It probably has close to 20KWh of storage. That means 20 killowatts for an hour or 1kW for 20 hours - you get the picture. The problem is that the leaf is a pure electric vehicle. Doing this with a Chevy Volt would be better since it could run on gas like a regular generator. There is some additional cost to make the charging system bidirectional, and there are certainly additional requirements on any system that can push power onto the grid. But yes, this is a neat trick that's not too hard to do once you've got a high power charger on an electric or hybrid car.

Re:Inefficient

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to keep in mind, the majority of our electricity use occurs during the day. Since power plants aren't things that you can just switch on and off on a whim, that means there's significant power generation at night that goes unused. Being able to tap that currently-wasted electrical potential and return it to the grid when it matters would allow us to run the grid more efficiently. Even if you ignore that possibility, it still means that a lot of EVs can be charged at night without disrupting the grid. Factor in the gradual uptake of EVs by consumers, and we are far from the catastrophic scenario you are envisioning.

Re:Inefficient

[CraftyJack]

Maybe that whole 1/2mv^2 thing? One horsepower is about 750 watts. So even an 80hp car is cranking out 60,000 watts. That's a lot of lightbulbs.

Re:Inefficient

[Bob the Super Hamste]

A decent backup generator fairly efficient (still not as good as a combined cycle gas turbine) the cost factor is actually the fuel costs. If you really wanted you could go get a big stationary 2 stroke diesel similar to what they put in cargo ships or in 400 ton trucks which are close to 50% efficient. Backup generators that use natural gas are cheaper than diesel ones but coal power for the grid is still lower cost. Also costs increase because the fuel isn't purchased on an industrial scale.

Re:Inefficient

[Culture20]

Because moving a big hunk of steel from A to B is harder than moving some heat from inside your fridge to the outside of the fridge. Just compare the size of gas tanks on a car versus a gasoline powered generator. That said, in an emergency scenario, I'd rather eat the food right away and save the energy for mobility to get to somewhere that has electricity.

Re:Inefficient

[Junta]

Because:
-Your day-to-day house energy usage doesn't involve accelerating a ton of mass to 60-70 mph repeatedly
-As a corollary, your house is not having to constantly spend energy to fight air resistance to maintain a high velocity
-Your car is poorly insulated with very large windows meaning the reduced volume of air to climate control is offset by the inefficiencies of dealing with thermal and light energy outside the car (even on pretty hot days, your house A/C generally gets to cut off a lot, in a car, that compressor generally has to run constantly on moderately hot days to maintain the same comfort).

Though 24kWh lasting two days still seems *very* optimistic. lights and refrigerator only would be my guess, and you probably would want to leave that fridge closed as much as possible. A/C might be ok so lang as not overly aggressive (might get 5-8 hours of runtime to spread out across the two days).

Re:Inefficient

[mr1911]

I'm curious about this though: from TFA: "..is sufficient to power an average Japanese home for about two days" - I wonder how that translates to the "average" US home (assuming there is such a thing)

about 15 minutes.

More if a few of the 55" plasma TVs are shut off.

Even more if homeowners realize that, with proper landscaping and insulation, it is possible maintain a very comfortable temperature with the windows open and air conditioner off even when it is 90 degrees outside.

Re:Inefficient

[GameboyRMH]

In many countries where electricity is expensive, even small factories buy and maintain their own diesel generators to save money.

Re:Inefficient

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

I live in the Cayman Islands so this could be useful here. When a huricane hits, there are no options to drive somewhere that has electricity.

Re:Inefficient

[Arlet]

Obviously, as soon as day/night usage are the same, the difference in price disappears, and people will stop additional night time charging.

At the end, you'll get a much more stable power consumption which allows much more efficient power generation.

Re:Inefficient

[bberens]

With the windows open it doesn't matter much how good your insulation is.

Re:Inefficient

[TheRaven64]

Though 24kWh lasting two days still seems *very* optimistic

According to my last electricity bill, I used 924kWh over six months, or around 5 per day. To use 24kWh in two days, you'd need more than double my electricity consumption. Given that I work from home (so have computers on and music playing most of the day), watch films on a projector (300W bulb), use a tumble dryer for all of my clothes and a dishwasher for all of my washing up, that seems insanely high.

Re:Inefficient

[Arlet]

Even more if homeowners realize that, with proper landscaping and insulation, it is possible maintain a very comfortable temperature with the windows open and air conditioner off even when it is 90 degrees outside.

Actually, with proper insulation, you'd want the windows closed, otherwise all the hot outside air just blows in. I don't have AC in my house, and during hot summers it's quite a bit cooler inside than outside, provided I keep all windows closed.

Re:Inefficient

[Lumpy]

90% of homes do NOT have variable rate power. so you dont pay less at night. the losses involved with this setup are enough to offset any savings even if you had a variable rate billing based on time of day.

It's a net loss no matter how you look at it.

Re:Inefficient

[j-beda]

I have seen a few writeups of people using their Prius as a whole-house UPS: http://www.priups.com/ http://hiwaay.net/~bzwilson/prius/priups.html

Re:Inefficient

[Lumpy]

Or do what most electrical companies do, build a power reservoir.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power_Plant

Problem is a LOT of power is lost in the process, Just like using the car battery or even a dedicated battery would.

Re:Inefficient

[Lumpy]

OR get a fridge that is actually efficient to begin with. front door fridges are a very dumb design.

http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/Conservation/chest_fridge.pdf

From over 6 years ago.... this setup would keep food cold for several days without power. and at 100 watts used per day (4.2WattHour) a very small computer UPS will keep it running for most of the outage.

Re:Inefficient

[vlm]

Yes but why does it take as much energy as it takes to run your house for 2 days just to drive your all-electric car a few miles?

The other answers are getting bogged down in wordiness and too many numbers.

Here's a simpler way to look at it, just look at the ratios of power output vs time duration.

The motor in your car is about ten to a hundred times bigger than the sum of the working electric motors in your house, right? Very roughly?

Given that, a chunk of energy runs your house about ten to a hundred times longer than it runs your car, right? Very roughly?

Makes sense to me...

Re:Inefficient

[Maury Markowitz]

"vehicle to supply electricity to power a house during a power outage or shortage"

How often do those happen where you live? In Toronto, it's about once every decade, or less.

Given that this occurs less often than I would replace the car, the effect on lifetime would be effectively zero.

So then I would be perfectly happy to draw on my batteries when there's a blackout.

Re:Inefficient

[Lumpy]

"Even more if homeowners realize that, with proper landscaping and insulation, it is possible maintain a very comfortable temperature with the windows open and air conditioner off even when it is 90 degrees outside."

I had a home that we almost never ran the AC during the summer because it was properly built and engineered. IT was a Geodesic Dome home that had a row of windows at ground level on the windward side and a cupola at the peak of the dome with windows that would open. Even on 98 degree days it was 10 degrees cooler in the home. and that temperature differential coupled with moving air made it very comfortable even in 60% humidity.

The problem is most homes are designed by morons for a "look" and not for efficiency or even occupancy.

Re:Inefficient

[jo_ham]

90% of homes in which country?

I'm not sure where you live, but my night time electricity is *considerably* cheaper than my day rate.

Re:Inefficient

[Fishead]

Ha ha ha... that reminds me of this time... oh... 10 years ago. There was this guy at work that had just bought a 2kg block of cheese from Costco, and the power went out. He was so worried about his cheese spoiling that he sat down and ate the whole block of cheese. Couple hours later, the power came back on.

      We did have an extended power outage due to a forest fire once where people were evacuated for 2 weeks. When they returned, they were told to move their fridges/freezers to the end of their driveways without opening them due to health concerns. Friends that were affected lost a lot of garden produce. The appliances were replaced by insurance/government assistance. Having an electric car tied to your home would have helped because I doubt it would have had the range to evacuate from the fire. As it was some of the towns along the evacuation route had to pack in generators to power the fuel pumps to pump fuel for people to evacuate.

      I'm fortunate enough to live in a province with a government run power monopoly who's mandate is to provide stable power instead of cheap power. We rarely have power outages and pay $0.667/kWh to $0.962/kWh for power (depending on consumption) that's almost entirely generated by hydro. I guess hydro-electric dams must be able to quickly scale for demand because we do not have day/night rates.

Re:Inefficient

[turkeyfeathers]

Make that 10 minutes... remember that Americans cook their fish before eating it.

Re:Inefficient

[Fishead]

Mistake due to insufficient coffee consumption...

My rates are $0.0667/kWh to $0.0962/kWh.

Re:Inefficient

[Arlet]

Depends on where you live. Where I live, 90% of homes have variable rate power.

Also, the difference in power generation efficiencies is quite big. Base load plants can run at 60% efficiency, while peak plants run at 30%. If enough people power their own house during the day, and charge during the night, you can leave the peak plants off-line. The charge/discharge efficiency of the battery is about 90%, combined with 60% efficient power generation results in 55% which is much better than 30%.

Re:Inefficient

[smooth wombat]

That's fine except for one big issue: size. To get the same amount of space in a chest refrigerator as a conventional one would mean either you make it deep or long.

If it's deep, you run into issues with people not being able to reach to the bottom without leaning in, like one does with a current chest freezer, or you have to make it long to accommodate the same internal space.

Either way, this type of device would require nearly everyone to redo their kitchen to accommodate this new device as it will not fit in the space currently used by normal fridges.

I'm not saying this isn't a good idea, I'm merely pointing out why people would be resistant to using this type of fridge.

Also, what about the freezer portion? Nearly every fridge made has a separate freezer section. Adding that into the equation would, again, increase the overall size.

Re:Inefficient

[robot256]

And according to my TED power meter, 12kWh is close to the MINIMUM my house has ever used in one day. Usually it's 30-40kWh in fair weather and 60-80kWh in summer with AC running. It's an old house with poor insulation, five active people using indoor lights all day, two fridges, and lots of cooking on the electric range and laundry in the electric dryer. We also do crazy things like paint the house in the summer which requires the AC be running with the windows open. Granted, if the power went out and we were running only the fridge and lighting it would go down considerably. But it will be much more practical to install ~3kW solar panel array than to rely on an electric car battery.

On the other hand, your household seems like a perfect candidate for this technology. Could be a lifesaver, especially if it means you could keep your business running during an outage.

Re:Inefficient

[Lumpy]

"Also, what about the freezer portion? Nearly every fridge made has a separate freezer section. Adding that into the equation would, again, increase the overall size."

do what rich people already do.

1 fridge
1 freezer
And the size stays the same... just laying down, look at photos of chest freezers. and there are already homes that use these types of systems already. the only problem is that people use the top of the fridge as counterspace.

Honestly who cares about pushing wide adoption. if you really care about efficency or trying to be off grid you make sacrifices for traditional looks or operation for what you are interested in. It's why most people that care about efficiency will not live in the typical poorly designed home.

Re:Inefficient

[mcavic]

I'm not sure where you live, but my night time electricity is *considerably* cheaper than my day rate.

I'm in the middle of the US, and last I checked most homes still have analog power meters that count the total usage for the month. Also, my bill shows total usage without differentiating between day and night.

Re:Inefficient

[Hylandr]

Why build a huge single reservoir when you can have a lot of smaller distributed reservoirs?

In an emergency situation where I have the choice between lights, or no lights, I will be dragging cables to may car. Whether or not it's electric is immaterial.

- Dan.

Re:Inefficient

[Infiniti2000]

Even more if homeowners realize that, with proper landscaping and insulation, it is possible maintain a very comfortable temperature with the windows open and air conditioner off even when it is 90 degrees outside.

Nope, impossible here in Florida. The high temperatures coupled with the high humidity make not running the air conditioner not an option. Anyone who says otherwise is a fucking moron. You can get away with murder here in Central Florida, but not without an air conditioner.

Re:Inefficient

[afidel]

924kWh *total* or per month? Because I could absolutely believe 924kWh per month, it puts you just above the US average of 908kWh/month but over six months I find that VERY hard to believe as that's 1/6th the normal which would be like some of the very extreme solar powered off grid houses I've seen using DC appliances.

Re:Inefficient

[Anonymous Coward]

U.S. here. I have a regular old meter with a spinning disc. I pay the same rate no matter what time of day (0.083 cents/kWh for the first 750 kWh, 0.067 cents/kWh thereafter.)

Only state I have lived with variable rate electricity was California. I've lived in 7 states along the east and west coast.

Re:Inefficient

[realityimpaired]

In an emergency situation where I have the choice between lights, or no lights, I will be dragging cables to may car. Whether or not it's electric is immaterial.

That's the thing... how much more are you spending to buy that electric car, and how does that compare against buying a $1000 electric generator to power your appliances? That's about what I spent on my current genny, which produces 7.5kW (got it on sale, regular price was $1400), and that's plenty for the sump pump, the freezer, the fridge, and the percolator. Our neighbours run their sump pump off our genny too, actually.

It's a really good idea if you're buying an electric car anyway, but buying an electric car specifically for this is horribly inefficient, and wasteful. If the battery really has enough juice to power the average home for 2 days, then as the OP said, either the car has a battery that's *way* larger than it needs to be, or the car is using *way* more electricity than it needs to. Or they're *way* underestimating how much power the average house uses... TFA says the battery is 28KWh... that's the equivalent of running my generator for 4 hours. Now, my generator produces about twice as much power as we actually need during a power failure (which is why we let the neighbours piggy back their sump pump off it), but if we were running the TV, the computers, the laundry, the air conditioner? There's absolutely no way that a 28KWh battery would provide enough juice to run the place for 2 days. 1 day, if we stretch it, but probably closer to 8 hours of normal daytime household load.

Re:Inefficient

[petermgreen]

Afaict at least here in the UK most homes have single rate power BUT dual rate is readilly available and if you are running large loads overnight (traditionally running storage and immersion heaters in an electrically heated house but charging an EV overnight would also fit the bill) then you would be pretty mad not to sign up for it.

Full on variable rate systems are being trialled but afaict are not yet widely deployed.

Re:Inefficient

[mr1911]

Good point. Glad I don't live in Florida.

Re:Inefficient

[cvtan]

I don't know where people live that have variable rates for residential electrical power, but in upstate NY it doesn't exist. I have a spinning disk meter and the charges don't account for when power is used. If you have a business, things may be different.

Re:Inefficient

[ColdWetDog]

Even more if homeowners realize that, with proper landscaping and insulation, it is possible maintain a very comfortable temperature with the windows open and air conditioner off even when it is 90 degrees outside.

Nope, impossible here in Florida. The high temperatures coupled with the high humidity make not running the air conditioner not an option. Anyone who says otherwise is a fucking moron. You can get away with murder here in Central Florida, but not without an air conditioner.

That's because you insane people live in the Florida interior fit only for Republicans and other alligators and snakes. The coast is fine. Except of course in Hurricane season, but cinder block construction solves that little problem. If God had intended man to live in the interior regions of the deep south, he wouldn't have made it a giant swamp.

Re:Inefficient

[couchslug]

Plenty of US users buy Lister-style diesels for off-grid use.

Example only, there is much more info for the Googling:

http://www.centralmainediesel.com/stats/PRINTABLE/K09944.asp?page=K09944

Re:Inefficient

[TheRaven64]

924kWh total. UK average is 3,084kWh/year, so this puts me at about 2/3 of the average. My appliances are all A rated for efficiency and all of my lights are CFLs, so that sounds about right. That people in the USA use six times as much as me doesn't surprise me greatly. The fact that you find it difficult to believe is part of the reason that the rest of the world regards you as insanely greedy and wasteful.

Re:Inefficient

[geminidomino]

The coast is fine

Which coast? On the west side here, it sure as hell isn't -- leaving your windows open just invites 99% humidity (except for that 1-2 hour window every afternoon where it reaches 100%, usually with lots of heavy thunder).

Also, from about Memorial day to Labor day, 90 degrees is the cooler end of what we get.

Gods, I hate this place...

Re:Inefficient

[Anonymous Coward]

It could also be:

The fact that you find it difficult to believe is part of the reason that the rest of the world regards you as their biggest customers

:)

Re:Inefficient

[Toonol]

I had a home that we almost never ran the AC during the summer because it was properly built and engineered. IT was a Geodesic Dome home that had a row of windows at ground level on the windward side and a cupola at the peak of the dome with windows that would open. Even on 98 degree days it was 10 degrees cooler in the home. and that temperature differential coupled with moving air made it very comfortable even in 60% humidity.

Well, the GP said "with the windows open", which implies he has a magic house. I wager your house would quickly hit the outside temp if you had a few windows wide open.

Re:Inefficient

[Hylandr]

I agree completely. But I doubt anyone is going to buy an electric car to use as a generator or power reservoir. I think the emphasis TFA failed to enunciate was "it could serve minimal power requirements for a time" Possibly as a means to make the car more attractive to purchase when any automobile could do that today. Hell add a PTO to a pickup and slap on a generator and you're set.

- Dan.

Re:Inefficient

[Firethorn]

That's the thing... how much more are you spending to buy that electric car, and how does that compare against buying a $1000 electric generator to power your appliances?

He mentioned 'electric or not'. I once figured out that for ~$300 and some machine work I could make a device to convert my truck into a generator and get ~50kw out of it.

Thing is, my truck's engine is generally going to be more efficient w/fewer emissions than tiny generators.

If the battery really has enough juice to power the average home for 2 days, then as the OP said, either the car has a battery that's *way* larger than it needs to be, or the car is using *way* more electricity than it needs

I use ~300kwh a month, which is ~10kwh/day, or about 2.4 days using the Leaf's 24kwh battery system. 24kwh@20 cents = $4.80 of electricity.

The 'standard' for EVs is around 3.6-3.8 miles per kwh, 86.4-91.2 miles per charge. I'd hardly call that excessive, and gives a cost of 5 cents per mile(using expensive electricity), when a car is closer to 13 cents(using $4 gas).

Your generator can theoretically make 180 kwh a day, but generators have to be sized for peak load, not average load. Odds are you're quite a bit under that most of the time.

but if we were running the TV, the computers, the laundry, the air conditioner?

Who says the 'typical Japanese home' runs all this stuff, especially during a power outage?

Re:Inefficient

[hoppo]

When the choice is between inefficiently-supplied electricity, or no electricity, which are you going to choose?

Re:Inefficient

[need4mospd]

It seems odd to consider this as a reliable temporary power source as it would only be 100% operational if your car was home and fully charged when the power went out. How many Japanese people were home with fully charged cars when the tsunami/quake hit?

Re:Inefficient

[TheLink]

Either the car takes too god damn much energy to run; it has too huge of a battery; or it can't power a whole house for long.

Cars DO use lots of energy.

That's why I laugh when people go about hunting down wall warts and turning off LCDs in sleep mode, but still drive a big SUV (and keep alternating between the brakes and accelerator ;) ).

That said, SUVs normally run on petroleum while the wall warts normally don't.

Re:Inefficient

[Overzeetop]

Sorry, 88F is not what I consider "comfortable,"and way to fucking hot to work effectively in. At 78F, my productivity drops noticeably (I know, because when I think "damned its hot in this office" I look ever and my thermostat is at 77-79F). Also, not everyone gets to ideally site their house on a generously sized lot on the properly sloped hill.

That said, if it meant keeping things running for a couple of days instead of a couple of hours, it's easy enough to open the windows, turn off the lights and other heat-generating appliances and just realize that the power's out and you're not going to get nearly as much done as you expected to. If I give up my quad-core PC and triple-monitor setup for my netbook I can burn about 1/40 of the electricity. The reason I don't do that every day is that even if I'm only 20% more efficient on the big screens, It costs me 25c a day extra in power for $240 in extra billings. Not a hard choice to make.

Re:Inefficient

[Infiniti2000]

Well, we do have our 3 days of winter when the weather drops down into the 50s.

Re:Inefficient

[Kyusaku Natsume]

The key thing is that this setup is actually very good for emergencies, specially in densely populated areas like urban Japan where you can't put easily a household generator like in small apartments.

From TFA:

The lithium ion batteries in a Leaf can story up to 24kWh (kilowatt hours) of electricity, which Nissan estimates is sufficient to power an average Japanese home for about two days. That means if the system was used for a few hours during the day, the car would still retain enough power to make trips.

Since supply is very tight in central and eastern Japan and they are forecasting that these zones will be facing power shortages up to the year 2014, this system is a very good fit to smooth the power demand. For example, for Tokyo Electric Company service area, the demand curve is in this link:
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/forecast/html/index-e.html#graph1

The yellow band is the time that TEPCO is requesting customers to reduce their demand to prevent blackouts. If this system becomes widely used instead of seeing their demand drop below 49% at 3 am. and getting close to 100% at 8 pm. in normal circumstances with the help of customers they could increase the demand in the midnight hours and decrease their peak demand even if customers go with their normal energy consumption, and in the process achieve something similar to a smart grid without actually building it.

Re:Inefficient

[s122604]

Pro Tip

save the paint-the-house-with-the-AC-on party until after the power comes back on..

Re:Inefficient

[Arlet]

If it's deep, you run into issues with people not being able to reach to the bottom without leaning in

If you have a small child, they could climb in the freezer, and hand you stuff.

Re:Inefficient

[Firethorn]

More and more homes, especially those outside of the midwest, much less outside the country, are getting the advanced meters. My parents have a switch on the water heater and air conditioner that allows the power company to turn it off during peak times, in exchange for a cut on their rate.

Same thing on the car charger should have the same effect.

Re:Inefficient

[afidel]

That's only 200W per hour, I guess that's possible in an extremely temperate climate like the UK but not many places in the US are going to be able to do that. I have a very modest house by US standards (102m^2 living area for 4 people) and even if built to a completely modern design criteria it would use ~1,500kWh per year just for heating a cooling. That kind of construction cost five times what my house is worth, so even over a 40-50 year horizon it makes little economic sense to build to that kind of standard. Would I prefer my house be more efficient than it is? Certainly I would and almost every year I've lived in it I've done something to improve it but trying to get down to the level you've achieved just isn't practical here.

Re:Inefficient

[s122604]

Thaaank you

If people are having a hard time grasping this, think about it this way. In an outage, a 20HP 12000 watt surge 10kw constant generator would power a moderate, or even somewhat large house quite comfortably (as long the user didn't get too crazy with high load items
could you imagine the performance of a even a small 4 cylinder sedan with only 20 HP?

Re:Inefficient

[Sparks23]

Japan never used to have power outages to speak of, but in the wake of the tsunami and Fukushima Dai-ichi being taken offline, outages are heavily on the mind of the average Japanese citizen. They had a ton of blackouts in March, and the Tokyo area in particular has been engaging in a ton of power-saving measures; the article from the summary even mentions a few (dimming subway station lights, to draw less power, for instance). Given that everyone's looking for ways to reduce their draw on the power grid at peak times, I'm not surprised that Nissan is looking into this possibility.

Re:Inefficient

[Culture20]

do what rich people already do.
1 fridge
1 freezer

I believe you mean lower middle class. Upper middle class often have two or three fridges, and rich people have walk-in fridges with an even colder walk-in freezer (and several smaller fridges scattered around the property).

Re:Inefficient

[Culture20]

But if you teach your child that climbing into the place where the ice cream and ice-ee pops are kept is normal, then you'd better lock that thing well.

Re:Inefficient

[iamhassi]

"This looks stupidly inefficient. Either the car takes too god damn much energy to run; it has too huge of a battery; or it can't power a whole house for long."

From the description:
" supply electricity to power a house during a power outage or shortage."

Wow you didn't even get past the first sentence! This isn't designed to power your house for life, it's for an blackout, when a summer storm just knocked out power and it's 100 degrees out and you don't have a $500+ 7000w gas generator laying around. Your car engine is far more powerful than any gas generator and it has gas tank much larger than generators, problem is you can't power your house with the engine on idle, it needs to be revved up a bit, and leaving your car outside revved up for hours risks it being stolen and is hard on the engine unless you know exactly how high the RPMs should be.

This is not a new idea, this guy did it with his Prius in 2009, but I'm glad a manufacture is finally designing a car that can function as a generator rather than the "backyard mechanics" method consumers had to use in the past.

Unfortunately they're designing this for the Nissan Leaf which is an electric vehicle with no gas engine so when the battery is dead on your Leaf from powering your house in a blackout you now have no power and no method of transportation. Not smart.

Re:Inefficient

[The Gaytriot]

Personally, I just leave them in there. It's like having having a personal food assistant, because they know where everything is. Just last night he handed me some frozen steaks from the bottom of the chest that I forgot I even had.

Re:Inefficient

[Speare]

How many Japanese people were home with fully charged cars when the tsunami/quake hit?

Hint: it doesn't have to be YOUR HOUSE that you're supporting. How many cars are in areas of Japan that were unaffected by the tsunami? How many of those owners would have charged up, driven a little closer to the region, and donated the remainder of their charge to help their neighbors? The elders in Japan once scoffed at the current generation of Japanese youth as lazy and disconnected with society-- until they came by the thousands to offer their sweat and tears for the Fukushima region.

Re:Inefficient

[Lumpy]

"and rich people have walk-in fridges with an even colder walk-in freezer"

Hmm, so I must be lower lower class as I only have a 1900 sq foot home with 1 fridge and 1 small cube freezer.
And the rich people homes that cost $12,000,000 that I install whole house audio, real theaters, lighting control, and automation only have 1 SubZero standing freezer and a single standing Fridge as well... Sometimes they have a small fridge unit in the bar, garage and near the theater... Most of the time the theater has a Post Mix pop machine and a kegerator.

So the guy that makes $690,000 a year and has a $12,000,000 home is lower middle class? OR, you know absolutely nothing about what rich people have in their homes.

  I have NEVER seen a walk in fridge or freezer at a rich persons home. and I have done work for one of the top 30 richest men in the world as well as several thousand of the poor plebes that have net worths that are only in the 9 digit range... The guy who had 5 Fararri's and a Porsche 911GT2 did not have a walk in fridge or freezer anywhere on his 2500 acre estate. He had 5 Segways to ride in the tunnel from the house to the garage if he did not want his chauffeur to bring a car around. The man has a Helipad with a bell ranger on it.

Still no walk in fridge or Freezer... Where do you get the outlandish idea that rich people have a resturant in their home?

Re:Inefficient

[sgtwilko]

28KWh... that's the equivalent of running my generator for 4 hours. Now, my generator produces about twice as much power as we actually need during a power failure (which is why we let the neighbours piggy back their sump pump off it), but if we were running the TV, the computers, the laundry, the air conditioner? There's absolutely no way that a 28KWh battery would provide enough juice to run the place for 2 days. 1 day, if we stretch it, but probably closer to 8 hours of normal daytime household load.

I realise that my case may be atypical, like many geeks I like efficiency so most of our lights are either LED or compact fluorescent lamps. However we use about 8 kW a day in the summer (when not using the washing machine) and about 11 a day in the winter. Washing days push us up to about 12 to 15 kW a day.
Weekly consumption is between 55kWh and 70kWh for summer and up to 85+kWh in winter.
We would use less but my wife likes light fittings that look nice but require multiple lamps.

This is for a family of 3, and although we have a gas hob we do most of our cooking with a electric grill and oven.

So 28kWh could do us for 2 days, but you wouldn't be driving anywhere afterwards...

Re:Inefficient

[semi-extrinsic]

Here in Norway, our apartment has just had a new fancy digital meter installed, so we can get variable rates. We are early adopters, but now it looks like everyone will have to switch to variable rate during the next five years.

Re:Inefficient

[sgtwilko]

0.083 cents/kWh for the first 750 kWh, 0.067 cents/kWh thereafter.

0.083 cents?
0.083 cents(US) is about 0.05 pence (Sterling).
I pay around 23p (~ 37 cents(US)) for the first 720 kWh per year, then about 9p (~14 cents(US)) for the rest, or around 450 times more than your cost above...

All my prices include VAT, please tell me 0.083 cents is after tax???

Re:Inefficient

[plover]

Energy-wise, the average American is a ravenous beast so the average house here draws a lot, as you pointed out. But the average house in Japan is what TFA used as their basis, and their usage habits are much more in line with the scenario above. Due to housing density, city dwellers also don't generally have the physical space to mount a 7.5 kWh generator, which is a large machine that needs outdoor air for intake and exhaust..

During a blackout, you're mindful of the things you need to keep running (indeed, you listed them.) And now, Japan has a lot of problems to deal with, and periodic blackouts are among them. Without space for a generator, the car looks like a pretty good idea.

Re:Inefficient

[plover]

He confused his dollars and cents. In the middle of the U.S. where I live I pay $0.11544 per kWh from June through August. (That's 11.544 cents.) So yes, you still pay three times what we do. But not 450 times more.

My electric co-op also offers a controlled interruptible service plan. For all my heat pump electricity, instead of $0.11544/kWh I pay only $0.0480/kWh year round, but it's hooked to a controller that can interrupt electricity to it during peak seasons or during emergencies. During peak usage periods, they send out a radio signal to everyone's interrupters. Each interrupter shuts off its load for 20 minutes out of each hour. Spread across the thousands of subscribers, they are able to reduce their peak demand during the hottest days of the year. Reducing peak demand means they were able to delay purchasing additional generating capacity, saving the co-op millions of dollars. The "inconvenience" to me is that my house gets a little bit warmer for a few hours on the hottest days. According to my wife, the rise in temperature is indicating the end of the civilized world, but I barely even notice, and for that I think I save about $40 a month on the electric bill in the summer.

Re:Inefficient

[geminidomino]

That's true. I usually spend them clocking an inordinate amount of time on my motorcycle along the country roads out in the boonies. :)

Re:Inefficient

[Cramer]

I think people are way underestimating the amount of power a car needs. Pushing a 1ton car up to 60mph is not going to be done with a laptop battery -- esp. with the AC on. (600 laptop batteries, maybe.) 28KWh is actually rather small -- but so's the Leaf. There are addons for the Prius that are 50 to 90 KWh (li-po replacing the NiMH)

At any rate, doing this with a Leaf is rather idiotic. It's just a UPS battery with wheels. And when you've drained the batteries, you no longer have a usable car. And it's actually been done many times before... google "PriUPS". (and the prius has the advantage of a gas engine to (re)charge it's batteries.)

Re:Inefficient

[bluefoxlucid]

I use a 420W spin drier for 3 minutes to dry my clothes. It's equivalent to the spin cycle on your washing machine, but at 3600RPM. Old designs were 600RPM and new washing machines spin at 900RPM. Polyester comes out wearable, cotton less so. Put your wool garments in a mesh bag to avoid extrusion. Most everything can hang dry in an hour, or tumble dry in 10 minutes.

Re:Inefficient

[sgtwilko]

Ahhh, thank goodness for that, three times screwed I can cope with.
At 450 times I was considering running a cable from over there... :-)

Do you have to pay tax on electricity?

Re:Inefficient

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the thing... how much more are you spending to buy that electric car, and how does that compare against buying a $1000 electric generator to power your appliances?

A lot less considering that $1000 generator is 10x the cost and illegal to use or put anywhere due to zoning laws over in Japan.

Of course mentioning anything you use means nothing since you don't live there and so is irrelevant.

Take away your generator and make that comparison again. All the pluses you list simply vanish and go away. And you too will be wishing for a battery to run things for a while.

Re:Inefficient

[Seraphim1982]

I'm surprised. Where I live (north-east US) they replaced all the analog meters several years ago with digital ones that included a short-range radio so they could fire most of the meter readers .

Re:Inefficient

[dunkelfalke]

What kind of wash mashines are these? Mine spins at 1800 RPM max, more expensive ones can do 2000.

Re:Inefficient

[Gordonjcp]

So with the PriUPS, he's basically wired an inverter to a car battery? I'm not sure how that's much of an innovation...

Re:Inefficient

[Cramer]

He's using the car's traction batteries, not a standard 12v "car battery". The inverters are to take the 360-600VDC down to something the UPS can work with (namely 96VDC.) The R3000XR UPS is an efficient DC switching design that does not use any transformers.

Re:Inefficient

[Seraphim1982]

Where in update New York? National Grid offers "SC1C Residential Optional Time of Use" service, which has three different rates (peak, off-peak and shoulder) and also a "Market Rate Service".

http://www.nationalgridus.com/niagaramohawk/home/rates/3_service.asp

Re:Inefficient

[Gordonjcp]

No, if you look at his diagram the inverter is hooked to the car's 12V battery which is charged from the traction batteries via another DC-DC converter.

Re:Inefficient

[Belial6]

How many of them have cars?

Re:Inefficient

[jonbryce]

In the UK, you have the option of a single rate, dual rate or three rate meter. If you go for a dual rate, there are two meter dials, and it switches over to the night rate for usually 7 hours per night. If you go for three rate, then you get a separate interruptible circuit with its own meter for use with storage heaters. The electric company switches the circuit on for either a fixed number of hours per day or a variable number of hours based on the weather forecast, at times of its choosing.

Re:Inefficient

[jonbryce]

0.083 cents per kWh? Either you have very cheap electricity, or you are using Verizon math.

Re:Inefficient

[bill_mcgonigle]

I'd like to be that efficient, but I'm not. I've got almost all CFL's and the top-rated refrigerator. What do you do for:

Heat (any circulator pumps?)
Air conditioning?
Computers (no desktops?)
Cooking - we use propane stove/oven with electric controls. Electric toaster/blender/coffee pot/microwave.
Washing machine (we got the highest-efficiency model available in the size we need)
Clothes dryer (ours is electric, the next will be propane)
Television?
Power tools?
Stereo system?
Pets (fish tank, etc?)
Well pump?

Also, how big is your family?

I can definitely see, by typing this out, how an absolute bill could be reduced to your levels by outsourcing much of the consumption (and consolidating/eliminating toys), but if you're internalizing all that at your rates, for a family, there are solar (off-grid) folks here who will pay top-dollar for your book. :)

Re:Inefficient

[TheRaven64]

Most likely it's top-loading. They can be a lot more stable than front-loading models - the clothes end up evenly distributed around the edge, while gravity pulls them downwards, so the machine jumps up and down. I had a top-loading spin dryer for a while, but I only used it on the 3KRPM cycle once. My socks came out about three feet long...

Re:Inefficient

[Cramer]

Who's diagram? PriUPS.com clearly states he's using the HV battery system; the LV system isn't good for much power.

I was specifically talking about the "Large System A" setup.

Re:Inefficient

[Gordonjcp]

Are we looking at the same page?

Re:Inefficient

[WindBourne]

Actually, night time prices may go DOWN, not up. The night time is significantly under utilized. By getting electric cars on the grid, utilities can afford to put on larger base systems and skip the dispatchable systems (expensive to run, but quick to alter loads). If the utilities can increase the loads, then they can charge lower rates overall.

Re:Inefficient

[Fjandr]

All the utilities in the NW US I'm aware of have the option of time-of-use pricing for residential customers. Some still haven't had meters changed out, but the utilities are rapidly catching up.

Re:Inefficient

[WindBourne]

THat would be either Wyoming (with near 100% coal and low taxes), or Washington or Idaho (with large hydro).

Here in Colorado Xcel we pay .09 for electricity, though boulder is apparently looking to lower theirs by creating their own electric company. I will say that with Colorado Xcel, if you have an electric car and get the variable rate, it is something like .09 daytime, but .05 nighttime, but they will nail you if you do the charge in the daytime (spike in demand amp will cost you HEAVILY). .

Re:Inefficient

[mcavic]

Our gas meters do have the radios now. They're battery powered, though, so I guess they still need a crew.

Re:Inefficient

[adolf]

Dear Lumpy,

You've inspired me.

When I am rich (I don't care if that involves being famous or not), I will make sure that my home has at least the usual kitchen fridge, and a multitude of dedicated freezers, and a kegerator in the home theater, and a kegerator in the office, and a kegerator in the garage. (I will only require one popcorn maker, but I will have a dedicated person to ferry it and its freshly-made popcorn joy to wherever I desire.)

I will also install a tunnel to the garage (thanks for the tip!), but I will not be using Segways to traverse that stretch. Instead, I will install an electric narrow-gauge railroad, powered by catalytic fuel cell fed by the fermented remains of the hand-harvested garden slugs that I will have imported from Spain. There will be a turntable at either end to turn the train 'round, which will be steam operated (just try to find a better actuator than a steam-driven piston!) using geothermal energy.

(All kidding aside: I've installed home theaters, too -- including at a place which had a helipad and a (singular) Porsche in the garage. I found the important amenities to be generally lesser than I have in my own, positively meager, home. But I wouldn't mind having a walk-in freezer and/or a cold room -- it doesn't seem like it'd be very expensive at all, and it would be terribly convenient for everything from storing hanging beef or venison, to dumping heat from a tweaked-out water-cooled PC rig.)

Re:Inefficient

[Cramer]

No, we aren't. Anyone who uses the 12V batt is a fool. (or just dmaned lazy... any idiot can go to WalMart, buy an inverter, and plug it into the socket) It's a tiny fraction of the power available from the car. The HV generator is good for ~50Kw; the aux battery is only good for 1Kw.

Re:Inefficient

[bill_mcgonigle]

The fact that you find it difficult to believe is part of the reason that the rest of the world regards you as insanely greedy and wasteful.

Since you've called us 'insanely greedy and wasteful', I'd appreciate a response to my sibling response about your consumption patterns, to see if you're being forthright and conscientious or deceitful and self-righteous.

I'll assume until then that you're single, have your heat and water provided by a source not counted in the bill, buy much of your food out, do your laundry out, etc.

To re-iterate, if that's not true, I really want to learn from your success.

Re:Inefficient

[TheRaven64]

I said most of that in my original post - I do my washing in the house, and use a tumble dryer. Almost all of my food is cooked at home. Heating is gas, that adds about another 50% to my total household energy consumption. Electric heating is insanely wasteful, pretty much no one in the UK uses it except for occasional top-ups (e.g. fan heater in a cold room), and the topic at hand was electricity usage, not total energy usage, so I didn't include that.

If you want to move beyond anecdotes and see some actual statistics, let's look at per capita energy consumption. The US average is about double the UK average, and we're at the high end of consumption for Europe - France and Germany consume less, with a similar standard of living.

Re:Inefficient

[NelsChristian]

Since power plants aren't things that you can just switch on and off on a whim,

Time to turn in your nerd license while you take a refresher EE/power course. Peaking plants, often natural gas burning turbines, are designed to be turned on and off as needed.

There may be idle machinery, but no wasted electrical potential. What do you think all those thousands of power EEs do with their time if not make sure the grid is reasonably efficient?

Been done already

[NixieBunny]

This guy did it years ago with his Prius. Trouble is, his electric utility is so reliable that he never gets to use the feature!

Re:Been done already

[Thelasko]

This guy actually used it during a power outage.

Re:Been done already

[vlm]

There was a QST magazine article about half a decade ago about using the prius traction battery and what amounted to a VFD to provide emergency power. Which is nice, except for the Prius legendary HF RFI problem. You can hear a prius from quite a distance on the radio due to interference; the irony of providing emergency power for radio gear using a prius which interferes with the radios was not lost on many readers. I guess for the VHF FM only crowd it works pretty well.

I cannot find the article in google, seems like QST magazine october 2005 is likely, but...

Re:Been done already

[fractoid]

Also, these guys have been advertising this as a feature of their system for near a decade. The only problem is that (last time I asked) they want $50k a pop for their motor controller.

Re:Been done already

[CastrTroy]

I thought the same thing could be used for gasoline engines. Many people who live in the country have a generator. However, many of them are ill maintainted and may not be operational when you need them. It would make much more sense to just have the car to be able to work as a generator. The added components would be pretty minimal. And the person would be much more likely to keep the thing maintained as they would be using the car on a regular basis.

Re:Been done already

[JasterBobaMereel]

..another reason not to buy a Prius

The first being that if you live in the US it might look like a really efficient car, but in the rest of the civilised world we have Non-Hybrid cars that make a Prius look like a Gas Guzzler ...They are modern Diesels ....

not so new

[Anonymous Coward]

This has been proposed before. It could become an essential ingredient in the overall energy strategy, buffering energy from erratic but renewable sources like wind and solar.

not that simple

[meridien]

When the mains power is out (such as a storm or auto accident), the crews working on the problem will have the power for that grid shut off so that they can work safely. Any properly installed standby generator will have a solenoid that disconnects the house from the mains while the generator is supplying power. This is REQUIRED by national electrical code. Imagine the lineman's surprise when he touches wires that are disconnected from the generating station and SHOULD BE CARRYING NO CURRENT but are powered because some nimrod connected a standby system improperly. Not good.

Re:not that simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Glad you pointed that out. Originally we were going to make it so easy a monkey could do it, but we didn't realize there were such things as electrical codes.

Cordially,
-Nissan

Re:not that simple

[Bob the Super Hamste]

My understanding is that you can't charge one of these from regular wall current but need at least 220V (It might be more) so if you were going to get the backup generator option you get the disconnect device kit as part of it as you will probably be installing new wiring any way to have one circuit with 220V on it this could be installed at the same time. Now if you were like my father who has several 220V circuits in his garage (one is rated to 50 amps) then the lineman may be in for a surprise but most people aren't like my father and don't need to run big hydraulic presses, lifts, compressors, or welders

Re:not that simple

[Anonymous Coward]

My understanding is that you can't charge one of these from regular wall current but need at least 220V

I am from the Netherlands, you insensitive clod. 220V IS our regular wall voltage over here (well, 230V I suppose).

Re:not that simple

[mr1911]

Or, if you manually connect your electric car, generator, or other backup power source, you also manually flip your main breaker so you are only powering your house. Otherwise, you will not get much utility out of your limited power source, would you?

And on a side note, no lineman that intends to go home at night would ever grab a line assuming it was not live, would he?

Re:not that simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine the lineman's surprise when he touches wires that are disconnected from the generating station and SHOULD BE CARRYING NO CURRENT but are powered because some nimrod connected a standby system improperly.

Oh, great... the "first post" of every article that even hints at grid inter-tie. Ok. We get it. We've gotten it for the last 40 years. You can't just plug a generator, inverter, etc. into your house wiring with a spliced extension cord or even a more professional-looking variant thereof. Transformers work in both directions. Duh. I strongly suspect that Nissan has considered this. Why has this warning, always phrased as if the audience has never considered it, become so fashionable lately?

Re:not that simple

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Yes I know that most of the rest of the world runs 220V (well 210V to about 250V), but the largest readership of /. is American so think of it more as a FYI for them.

Re:not that simple

[Anonymous Coward]

The lineman first checks the line -- not hot. He starts working on it. Then you connect your generator to the line that he has previously determined to be cold. He's smart and careful. You're dumb and careless. But he's the one who doesn't go home.

Re:not that simple

[Rich0]

Yup, although I suspect that linemen take precautions just the same.

At work they have some 33kV supply lines running 3-phase. They needed to do work on expanding the lines, and I noticed that the first thing they did was attach cables to short the three lines together using large fiberglass poles with tools attached (the lack of a spectacular display demonstrated that they had turned off the power successfully). The place I work is actually pretty anal-retentive regarding safety so the chance of a breaker somewhere being closed was going to be astronomically low, but assuming that safeguards fail is part of being anal-retentive about safety.

Re:not that simple

[Bengie]

Imagine the car owners surprise when his car is trying to power the entire neighborhood and the power inverter burns out in a few seconds.

I'm sure they'll have some safety device.

Re:not that simple

[Arlet]

The lineman first checks the line -- not hot. He shorts the line. He starts working on it. He gets to go home at night.

Re:not that simple

[Rashdot]

Never just grab a power line, use the back of your hand to check it first. If there's still power on it your hand would close and you wouldn't be able to let it go if you touched it with the front of your fingers...

Re:not that simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you know nothing at all.

Linemen treat a wire as live all the time. Plus I don't see many of them making sure they are grounded and standing in a puddle while they touch a wire. they ALWAYS are insulated from ground. Plus many of them work on live wires. Most of the time you cant kill the power.

Next time find out how they actually do their job instead of just making things up.

Re:not that simple

[vlm]

Its a nice story, and VERY popular to retell, but if the drop line fuse is not blown, trying to backfeed an entire subdivision will instantly stall the engine, if not burn out the alternator and/or blow the drop fuse.

The actual failure mode is the drop fuse blows, the lineman tries to replace it, your generator happens to be out of phase with the national grid, and either the fuse pretty much detonates in the linemans hands, or the generator literally blows up, as in crankshaft sheared off and piston flys thru the oilpan type of destruction.

Humorously the only people who retell this story are those who never tried it. Anyone who has actually tried this, knows for a fact that its a miracle if you can backfeed merely your own house without blowing the generator.. the inrush current of the fridge, freezer, AC compressor, furnace blower, dehumidifier, computers, maybe an oven, clothes dryer, or dishwasher that was on when the power cut, and sump pump all trying to instantly start will blow the breaker for sure... now scale that up by an entire subdivision, say a hundred homes, sometimes I wonder its a miracle the grid can be brought up at all without blowing itself back down. The inrush current to an entire subdivision must closely resemble the lightning strike that took it down...

Re:not that simple

[vlm]

Its an urban legend, its not even true. Unless your hybrid vehicle is a multi-megawatt nuclear submarine, backfeeding an entire neighborhood will instantly kill any normal sized generator.

Now there are interesting ways to kill someone using a generator, but they don't involve backfeeding a neighborhood. The drop fuse goes off like a grenade, unfortunately while the lineman is holding it. The lineman walked thru a rain puddle energized by an extension cord laying in the puddle, coincidentally for the purpose of backfeeding. Any accident even remotely involving a generator and a lineman is always reported via the journalist filter as being due to "backfeeding" even if the actual accident report is the lineman tripped over it laying on the ground, or a refueling fire incident.

Re:not that simple

[cranky_chemist]

Actually, linemen have, in fact, been electrocuted by improperly connected generators. This is NOT an urban legend.

http://www.electricenergyonline.com/?page=show_news&id=38786

Re:not that simple

[bwayne314]

This ! If only I had points!

Re:not that simple

[jank1887]

Chevy Volt comes with a 110V charging cord. Of course, it takes ~8-10 hours to charge at that voltage due to current limits. the charging station you can install gives you 220V and supposedly cuts that to 3-4hrs. so it can do either.

Re:not that simple

[kiwimate]

My understanding is that you can't charge one of these from regular wall current but need at least 220V

Nope, you can charge using 120 V, but it takes a lot longer. 120 V charging is defined as level 1 charging, while 240 V is level 2 charging. There's also a level 3 charging for very fast charging, which I think from memory is only being tested in Japan right now.

Search on SAE J1772 for more details.

Re:not that simple

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG, someone needs to warn them before home solar power catches on! They probably haven't solved that problem yet!!!!

Re:not that simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Any home power generation capability always includes a power main switch, either manual or automatic. These systems usually only have two states, grid power and generator power. On ours it is physically impossible for power from the generator to make it to the lines. There is a 6" air gap between the powerline source and the generator source, and a set of metal contact that flip from one to the other between them.

Re:not that simple

[TheLink]

I thought he gets a junior lineman to short the line for him. That way he gets to go home at night... Whether he sleeps well at night depends on what happens to the junior and his conscience ;).

Re:not that simple

[Idbar]

You're telling me that millions of UPS systems around the world can cause a reflection towards the electrical network and kill the worker that is trying to fix the problem. Yet, nobody has complained about it?

Re:not that simple

[Idbar]

But, also, there has been a lot of research in the area of Vehicle to Grid which allows also to return to the grid, not only to your house. I'd assume it will be safer to provide only local and then think about going further and return back to the grid.

Re:not that simple

[DigiTechGuy]

Most American homes have 220v coming in. It is actually quite uncommon not to have 220v in America. Just most devices and appliances run on 110v. It's trivial to add 220v outlets assuming your main is sufficient for the amperage required.

Re:not that simple

[realityimpaired]

Actually, many houses have 220V sockets anyway... either for an electric dryer or an electric stove. It really isn't hard to wire a socket for 220V from a standard electric mains panel, you just need to wire it in to two breakers, one on each side of the panel. The power coming in to your house from the street is already 220V, which gets stepped down to 110V because of the way it's wired in the panel.

Re:not that simple

[Urkki]

In the countries using 220-240 Volts, I think the power coming to the house is generally 3 phase 380 Volts, each phase being 220 alone, and can be directly used the for normal 1 phase circuits in the house. Stoves, or generally any device which may draw more than about 2 kW, will usually take all 3 phases (and needs to have fixed wiring or use a totally different plug with more pins).

Re:not that simple

[semi-extrinsic]

Actually, here in Europe where we have 230V, car manufacturers are already talking about going to 400V (which is what the street level transformer boxes feed off.)

Re:not that simple

[semi-extrinsic]

Also, always keep your left hand in your pocket. That way you avoid accidentally grounding yourself (with the current most likely going across your heart).

Re:not that simple

[sjames]

They do tend to be cautious about things like that for good reason. Of course, the sorts of times when a backup generator is needed are exactly the conditions for linemen to get tired and start skipping steps (deliberately or through fatigue) and make mistakes.

One thing to note though, linemen take a rather dim view of idiots endangering their lives with sub-standard generator setups. If they find you backfeeding, you can be sure that you will be the last person in the state to get power back. Your generator may or may not accidentally get urine in it's fuel supply.

Re:not that simple

[Bob the Super Hamste]

I guess I never thought about that as I have gas stove, dryer, water heater, and furnace and every house I have lived in has had them as well (mostly older homes but even the new one my mom has has all gas appliances). I learn something every day.

Re:not that simple

[DavidWeight]

Well certainly not in the UK-aside from anything else you can draw 3kW from any socket, and three phase is certainly not easily available without special arrangements with the power company. Stoves or similar (commonly boilers) that draw 30+ amps (7+kW) are normally hardwired in, with a dedicated breaker

Re:not that simple

[RobertLTux]

any lineman that should be sticking his paws anywhere near KV lines should be putting a volt meter to the lines first.

But yes you should either have a pro do the install or the OEM should be making sure that a half blind idiot can install this properly

Re:not that simple

[petermgreen]

backfeeding an entire neighbourhood isn't going to happen but i'd think backfeeding a small group of houses is well within the realm of possibility if no high power equipment happens to be turned on at the time.

Re:not that simple

[sgtwilko]

All the houses I've lived in in the UK have 1 phase for the entire house and the three phases are used sequentially as you go along the road.

When some but not all of the phases go down and it's night, you can see the effect by looking down the street to see every third house either lit-up or off depending on it being one or two phases that are out.

Re:not that simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Moreover, when the real mains comes back, it will likely be in different phase than the other power and you may have a serious problem.

Re:not that simple

[hey]

So a house doing this would need some kind of automatic backflow value. Doesn't seem impossible to me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diode

Re:not that simple

[Urkki]

Well, UK has some other... quaint stuff too ;-) But that blackout thing sounds pretty bad, and that kind of system sounds like it's susceptible for problems.

But I guess it has a lot to do with lesser demands per household. I mean, aren't gas stoves and boilers and heaters quite common, instead of electrical ones?

Re:not that simple

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's not impossible, but you're going to need more than diodes if you want to allow AC in only one direction.

Re:not that simple

[Neil Boekend]

While the generator owner should face heavy charges, the lineman is an idiot. He should have grounded the line to be sure the line is dead, and stays dead. He himself should not be grounded, so no current can flow through him.
He must have thought "The line is dead anyway, I can do without the normal safety procedures". That's his fault, and his alone.

Re:not that simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Riiiight, blame the innovating home owner. Implement a testing protocol to prevent such injuries or strengthen the national code. You make me want to generate my own electricity illegally to teach the power companies a lesson

Doesn't suprise me

[Bob the Super Hamste]

It doesn't surprise me much as I have heard industry rumors of doing similar things with the smart grid and basically using EVs as a storage medium. Yes I work in this industry so /. here say seems to be correct on this.

As a side note I have also used a car to heat up the garage in the winter to work on it or just change oil. Basically you go and attach a vent hose (aluminum dryer vent works great) to your exhaust and route it out the door. Then start your vehicle and let it run for half an hour. In my uninsulated garage I can get the temp up near freezing from below zero (Fahrenheit). Once warm shut off the car and change your oil. If there is one thing a car engine is good at it is producing heat.

Re:Doesn't suprise me

[Anonymous Coward]

As a side note I have also used a car to heat up the garage in the winter to work on it or just change oil. Basically you go and attach a vent hose (aluminum dryer vent works great) to your exhaust and route it out the door. Then start your vehicle and let it run for half an hour. In my uninsulated garage I can get the temp up near freezing from below zero (Fahrenheit). Once warm shut off the car and change your oil. If there is one thing a car engine is good at it is producing heat.

I've tried this with my Nissan Leaf, but I'm having issues.

1. I can't find the exhaust pipe
Since I couldn't find the exhaust, and not wanting to get carbon monoxide poisoning, I held my breath while trying the next step
2. I left the car running for 2 hours, but the garage isn't heating up

Please advice.

Re:Doesn't suprise me

[Firethorn]

If there is one thing a car engine is good at it is producing heat.

I'm in an area where electricity is expensive, and we heat with fuel oil.

One idea I've had is to build a cogeneration system. Basically, fuel oil is diesel. So I'd get a standard diesel generator, but rather than running the cooling system outside, I'd have it hooked into my house heating system. For even more efficiency, rather than emit the exhaust directly outside, I'd pass it through a heat exchanger first.

Note: This is safe if done correctly, but you have to know what you're doing, and seal the exhaust outlets up good. Even then, I'd highly recommend a carbon monoxide sensor.

That way I'd produce power at more or less 80% efficiency, by 2/3rds of it would be heat from oil I'd be burning for heat anyways, alloing me to burn fuel oil to produce electricity at nearly 80% efficiency.

Preventing factor? Capital cost of the system outweighs the payback period. :(

Re:Doesn't suprise me

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, this is right.

No-one is seriously suggesting that electric cars would feed power into the grid when the power supply is shut down.

The idea is that electric cars would effectively act as a giant distributed storage battery to feed power into the grid at peak times, and would soak up power when less is being used.

Essentially, the proposal is an answer to the question of how you can maintain a reliable power grid with a high proportion of unreliable, renewable power: you save the power in a battery. It's just that in this case, you have millions of batteries with wheels.

Convenience

[SEWilco]

If you have a car with an electric source it is convenient to be able to direct the electricity where it is needed. I don't need an emergency generator often enough to own one, but it would be nice to be able to use my car that way. If the car can also be powered with gasoline, then it becomes more reliable in a likely emergency because it sometimes takes days to repair storm damage. I'm not intending to use it long-term, so I don't care how many miles per millimeter of tectonic movement I might be getting, I'd just want to avoid having to eat everything in the freezer within two days. As tempting as that sometimes might sound.

soaks up excess grid capacity

[bre_dnd]

This is not as stupid as it sounds at first.

The problem with generating electricity is that you can't (normally) store electricity -- so generating capacity is dimensioned for the peak load. A lot of excess capacity is available at night -- some of which you can't just shut off. It takes a long time to power up a coal/nuclear power plant. In mountainous regions the night excess is used e.g. to pump water uphill, back into a lake that is part of a hydroelectric plant.

Charging the car at night when rates are low makes sense, and running a few lightbulbs or a TV set doesn't use the amount of power you need for driving.

Re:soaks up excess grid capacity

[Anonymous Coward]

What about capital costs of setup of this system?

Taking power out of a grid is easy. You just plug in then charge when rates are low (ie. the rage behind "Smart Grid"). But this ain't easy to do to power your house from the battery. There are considerations,

1. Converter is needed to power grid
2. Safety needs to be a considerations - you can only supply power if grid is energized or you can kill people working on a downed line, etc.
3. Batteries wear out - that's why they are almost never used for grid backup power - VERY expensive and VERY limited.

So yes, great idea until you think about it. It will not save you money by a long shot, in battery costs alone, never mind the rest of the capital costs!

As to energy generation and demand, the demand is predictable and there is appropriate measures taken to minimize the costs (eg. fuel, wear and tear, etc). Electricity at night is not cheaper because there is excess capacity running into ground. It is cheaper because there is cheaper always-on capacity running providing a larger percentage of the total mix as more expensive power is off.

Pumped storage is arbitrage between expensive gas turbines (especially when gas prices go up) and cheap coal/nuclear. It is a highly efficient, 100% reusable battery system that cannot ever be matched by an electrochemical battery - gravity doesn't wear out! :)

Re:soaks up excess grid capacity

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah... sounds great, including the decreased battery life from such activity, wich will then be even better for them to sell another battery for 7k or so $/€ every 3 years or less. Not economical at all imo.

Re:soaks up excess grid capacity

[kiwimate]

One of the big problems with "smart grid" as a term is it's so nebulous. There are plenty of people who are really, really clever and very, very experienced who will argue passionately that we already have a smart grid and we should be more properly talking about a smarter grid. But there are as many definitions of smart grid as there are consultants looking to make a buck.

Look at this definition:

smart grid - The integration and application of real-time monitoring, advanced sensing, communications, analytics, and control, enabling the dynamic flow of both energy and information to accommodate existing and new forms of supply, delivery, and use in a secure, reliable, and efficient electric power system, from generation source to end-user.

Frankly, I don't like this definition because it's way too verbose. If you want to get to the essence, it's two way communication and control.

But here's the thing to keep in mind. Lots of people have cars. Not a lot of people have a pumped storage facility, or even the geography to set one up.

Energy demand is indeed highly predictable, but there's always an element of the unknown. The issue we're finding these days is energy generation can be highly predictable but public sentiment wants it to be clean and green without realizing that you sacrifice the reliability and/or the price efficiency of coal. Everything in electricity is about arbitrage, at least at the wholesale level.

Forget about saving money. If you already have a car, which in modern day U.S. many people see as a necessity (please, no-one respond with your anecdotal "not me, I take the bus/ride my bicycle everywhere" - that's not my point), and are now told you can effectively use it as a giant whole-house UPS, that's going to be worth something to a lot of people.

Re:soaks up excess grid capacity

[Anonymous Coward]

"In mountainous regions the night excess is used e.g. to pump water uphill, back into a lake that is part of a hydroelectric plant."

I'd never even thought about this in depth before, but the simplicity of the above is full of win!

Re:soaks up excess grid capacity

[kiwimate]

It's an elegantly simple concept, indeed. The biggest problem is finding the right topograpy (although there are ways to deal with that - but then it becomes less simple). FERC has a paragraph that points out some of the crucial points quite succinctly:

These projects are uniquely suited for generating power when demand for electricity is high and for supplying reserve capacity to complement the output of large fossil-fueled and nuclear steam-electric plants. Start-up of this type of project is almost immediate, thus serving peak demand for power better than fossil-fueled plants that require significantly more start-up time. Like conventional projects, they use falling water to generate power, but they use reversible turbines to pump the water back to the upper reservoir. This type of project is particularly effective at sites having high heads (large differences in elevation between the upper and lower reservoir). /QUOTE

Re:soaks up excess grid capacity

[DerekLyons]

The problem with generating electricity is that you can't (normally) store electricity -- so generating capacity is dimensioned for the peak load. A lot of excess capacity is available at night

Yes and no. I suspect less excess is available than you might think. Excess capacity costs money, and utilities have spend decades either finding customers for that excess or finding ways to minimize it's generation or not generating it at all.
 

running a few lightbulbs or a TV set doesn't use the amount of power you need for driving.

No, but it does diminish the range available in the car in the event the blackout or emergency/disaster persists. Also, in my case, I'll need enough power to run a small heater in subfreezing temperatures in case the incident occurs during winter.

Re:soaks up excess grid capacity

[EvilStein]

"Charging the car at night when rates are low makes sense"

This is not the case with many many utility companies. The rates are the same regardless of the time of day.

My electric company is charging $0.09/kwh regardless of what time it is. No peak/off peak hours.

Re:soaks up excess grid capacity

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are people so mentally locked in to this paradigm? You can store electricity easily in the form of air pressure, gravimetric potential energy, and chemical reactions.

Hydraulic pressure accumulators, water towers, and electrolysis all store energy at reasonable efficiency with minimal investment in equipment.

Re:soaks up excess grid capacity

[CastrTroy]

But why waste your car's batteries in the process? Your car only has a limited number of charge cycles, plus your car isn't inside the house all the time. How much would it cost for a bank of batteries so that you'd never have to pay peak power rates? Basically charge the batteries up at night or on the weekend, and use the stored power during the day. My local utility charges almost double for power during the day. I don't think it would take that long to offset the price of the batteries. Does anybody sell such a system?

Re:soaks up excess grid capacity

[bill_mcgonigle]

My local utility charges almost double for power during the day. I don't think it would take that long to offset the price of the batteries.

I'm gonna go with the lack of a market here and say, "no, it would be too expensive." Happy to be proven wrong, but it's not the most brilliant idea (no offense, just not Tesla-level cleverness), so we'd have to assume people have looked into it before and dismissed it as feasible.

Re:soaks up excess grid capacity

[kiwimate]

That is a great question. There are other people who know more about EVs than I do in this kind of capacity, but one really good proof of concept example is what MAGICC has been doing. Imagine that you have not just your EV but hundreds or thousands of them and they have the smarts to talk back to a central computer. Now you can start getting really clever with the computer calling on those EVs in series to produce frequency regulation services. You'll get paid (the figures out of MAGICC would suggest something like six dollars a day is possible - not going to make you rich, but I wouldn't say no) and the grid operator now has a very fast ramping system that could potentially aggregate up to several MW and enhance grid reliability and efficiency.

By the way, a few posters have suggested this is going to kill your battery. I'm not going to scoff at that, but the technology is getting WAY better and attending conferences like the ESA conferences will quickly give you the idea that a lot of really clever people are putting a fair chunk of research into improving the technology.

Not to gloss over the problems, but this is what being a researcher is all about, and it's really exciting.

Re:soaks up excess grid capacity

[CastrTroy]

It's only been very recent, at least where I live, that utilities have started to charge different rates for different times of the day. Maybe it's just taking a little time for products to come to market.

Re:soaks up excess grid capacity

[bill_mcgonigle]

Hrm, I know many businesses have been metered this way for 30-ish years. I guess the residential differential could be different enough to make the market viable.

Penny drops

[arkhan_jg]

I did initially think 'Why on earth would you go to the trouble and inefficiency of this with an expensive electric car?' and then the penny dropped. It's in Japan, where they were having rolling brownouts due to the nuclear disaster and the loss of capacity, and are still under threat of blackouts over the summer.

Re:Penny drops

[Anonymous Coward]

Or here in the USA where storms seem to knock out power a lot. My parents in a respectable suburb of Chicago lost power for 13 hours a couple weeks ago during a storm. This of course shutdown the sump pump and flooded 5-6 inches in the basement.

This has happened before so their basement is "flood ready" with all things up off the floor or in tall plastic containers. Others in the neighborhood, with finished basements, did not plan for this and ended up throwing tons of carpet, furniture, etc out.

Disclaimer: My father told me this, I do not live in their basement.

Re:Penny drops

[llZENll]

Makes total sense to me, many of my neighbors have $10-30k backup generators installed that have never been used as of yet. If you can offset this cost to a car you are going to use everyday that basically discounts the cost of the car to almost free, plus you get to take it with you when you move rather than it being a sunk cost in your house. Granted the backup generators are natural gas and will run indefinitely, but considering they have never been used, and most power outages are quite short using your car is a great middle ground between having no backup and a very expensive dedicated system.

Re:Penny drops

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Makes total sense to me, many of my neighbors have $10-30k backup generators installed that have never been used as of yet. Granted the backup generators are natural gas and will run indefinitely,

I'm putting a grid-tie solar panel system on my house and am over-speccing it so as to use the excess to partially charge an electric car. A system like this would be great for me because with the solar power it would be able to run indefinitely as well, but without the duplication of dedicating batteries to the solar system.

Re:Penny drops

[mad flyer]

No, there is absolutely no black or brownouts, it was considered at first, but once everybody was asked to stop wasting electricity with aircooling at full blast with windows open on every shopping mall the demand became actually 30 to 40 % lower than the year before. This with the fact that the summer is really cool compared to usual means that Tepco is FAR from being maxed out. Check the operation Yashima website to have data: http://kanmisikou.net/lab/power/

Re:Penny drops

[Agripa]

Where I am in Missouri, we generally have 2 or 3 short duration and 1 long duration blackouts per year not counting power loss due to weather. The ice storm a couple years ago knocked out power for almost a week during continuous sub zero F weather. A gas furnace is useless without power for the blower motor.

I have a small gas powered backup generator, several online UPSes, and am considering a larger backup generator.

Re:Penny drops

[Anonymous Coward]

There were black-outs only in the extreme suburbs and only for the first few weeks. (I am kind-of on the edge of Tokyo and I didn't have any black-outs).
Anyway, on really hot days, the power usage has so far only gone up to 80% or so of capacity lately, so I think things are basically ok for now.

And also, I have to ask: What does "The Penny Drops" mean? If you drop a penny, does something special happen?

Not exactly a new idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

Been doing this for years with an inverter, a regular gasoline vehicle, and a dropcord. Start car, connect inverter to battery, connect dropcord to inverter, run dropcord to location that needs electricity, plug in electrical device, eat cake. Yes, it turns your vehicle into a very inefficient generator. But when the power's out and you need to run a radio or TV to see if the tornado is heading your way, then maybe kw/gal doesn't really seem that important.

Re:Not exactly a new idea...

[sosume]

How about turning on your car radio unstead?

Great! We can eliminate peak load

[Anonymous Coward]

by having everyone charge everything at night!

I remember when this was a fuel-cell discussion...

[dAzED1]

There was a time when people discussed the idea of having natural gas be the fuel for a small fuel cell system in homes, with the hydrolyzer being there at the house. Then, when you got home with your fuel cell car, you plugged in, fueled up, and then the fuel cell plant in your car would add to the power generation capability in the house. The idea was that when you're not home, you don't need as much power at your house. I was hoping that future would eventually happen, now we're just talking about batteries. Much less...sci-fi, cool, etc. Charge a battery so the battery can power a house later? Why not just...have battery powered LED lights for the short term emergencies (since that's all your car would cover well, anyway) instead of the extreme waste from the energy you'd bleed off during conversion and transmission?

Really really useful here! (in Vietnam)

[wisebabo]

You know, this would be really really useful here in Vietnam where the extraordinary growth rate coupled with communist era bureaucracies/corruption has left power supplies lagging far behind demand. I would dearly love a generator I could use to power my abode when the power goes out (typically in the hottest part of the day which in Vietnam is pretty hot!). This is probably true of a lot of developing countries.

Also in my previous career in the film industry having a powerful generator that is not only mobile but transports itself (and cargo and crew!) would be a godsend for shots not on the studio lot.

Re:Really really useful here! (in Vietnam)

[Dcnjoe60]

You know, this would be really really useful here in Vietnam where the extraordinary growth rate coupled with communist era bureaucracies/corruption has left power supplies lagging far behind demand. I would dearly love a generator I could use to power my abode when the power goes out (typically in the hottest part of the day which in Vietnam is pretty hot!). This is probably true of a lot of developing countries.

Also in my previous career in the film industry having a powerful generator that is not only mobile but transports itself (and cargo and crew!) would be a godsend for shots not on the studio lot.

But could most people in developing countries afford a Leaf? And, if they could, where would the extra power come from to keep recharging them? If the electrical infrastructure is not up to the task before adding a bunch of electric cars, how will it support them. This isn't something that applies to just 3rd world countries. California is concerned that their electrical grid cannot support wide spread adoption of all electric vehicles, too.

Whether in a Nissan Leaf or a a dedicated storage pack, a battery can only provide power upto the power that was put into it (actually a lot less as it is not 100% efficient). Therefore, to charge your Leaf takes power from the grid. Using the Leaf to power your house just replaces the lost power from the grid (plus it means you won't be able to drive anywhere because the battery is depleted).

A much better solution, if you are in areas prone to power loss, is to have a backup generator. If you aren't in such areas, then a little portable generator to power your refrigerator, if you are really concerned about it, would be a lot cheaper. Of course, you would have to balance the cost of replacing the spoiled food against the cost of the generator. For most people, it would be cheaper to replace the food if long lasting power outages are a rarity.

Re:Really really useful here! (in Vietnam)

[c6gunner]

Um, DC-AC inverters have existed for a long, LONG time. I have a 1,500W inverter for my car - it cost $120 on sale. You can pick up a 3,000W inverter for about $300. The only limitation is the power-rating of the car's generator; mine produces a maximum of 1,920W and is a bit on the beefy side - most cars would produce less. Still, 1,500W is plenty to power the basics.

Re:Really really useful here! (in Vietnam)

[Anonymous Coward]

Now this is a market calling for a vehicle.

I can see a series hybrid model car selling in places like this. The generator part would be able to handle multiple types of fuel [1] like gasoline, propane, natural gas, and perhaps even diesel. It would have a larger than normal gas tank (say 100-150 gallons). This way, it could be used for running a house off an inverter based generator, and can be driven for refueling. The advantage of an inverter based generator is that the spindle doesn't have to keep at 3600 RPM for us americans, or exactly 3000 RPM for Euro applications. It can run whatever RPM is suitable for the amount of electrical load coming from it, and the batteries/inverter would take care of making sure the output is good sine-wave AC.

It could also be a parallel hybrid. It wouldn't be far-fetched to have a true SUV (not something made to look cool in a mall packing lot) that would also be able to provide power for a couple houses, as well as basic transportation.

[1]: I've seen a backhoe from the 1950s have the ability to handle both gasoline and diesel power, although it ran gasoline initially just to get the block warmed up before switching to diesel for the main action.

Re:I remember when this was a fuel-cell discussion

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry for posting AC.

I'm also worried about the extra charge/discharge cycles shortening the life of the car's battery. This is one instance where Top Gear actually has it right. Batteries are not the way forward for electric vehicles.

What about the car?

[Anonymous Coward]

A couple years ago here in the U.S., a bad wind storm came through and knocked out all power in our city. It took several days for them to bring the grid back up for everyone again, but in the meantime, EVERYONE was without power. Including the gas stations. Unfortunately, I still had to get to work every day, and it got to the point that people could not do anything for lack of gasoline to get anywhere.

So, supposing this happens again, and I own an electric car, this is a great strategy for keeping the house up and running. But now my car is depleted. How do I get to work or go anywhere? Even if there was an electric re-charging station (and there's not), then there's a good chance they will out of power as well.

Something tells me this was not thought through too well.

did it for 'canes

[i.r.id10t]

When we had 2 hurricanes hit here in N Fla in 2005 I did it with my Nissan Altima and 2 400 watt inverters I got from a car stereo store. No generators to be found *anywhere*, I had myself my wife a 3 year old and a newborn to worry about.

One inverter kept the fridge and freezer going, the other ran a few flourescent shop lights and some low wattage fans.

No power for 10 days, had power back for a week, then no power again for 7 days. Didn't live in luxury, but we were mostly comfortable in the evenings and at night. Day time I came in to work, wife and kids went to the mall.

Re:did it for 'canes

[Anonymous Coward]

When we had 2 hurricanes hit here in N Fla in 2005 I did it with my Nissan Altima and 2 400 watt inverters I got from a car stereo store. No generators to be found *anywhere*, I had myself my wife a 3 year old and a newborn to worry about.

One inverter kept the fridge and freezer going, the other ran a few flourescent shop lights and some low wattage fans.

No power for 10 days, had power back for a week, then no power again for 7 days. Didn't live in luxury, but we were mostly comfortable in the evenings and at night. Day time I came in to work, wife and kids went to the mall.

I've got a 2500W inverter that I hook up to my 4Runner to run our fridge when the power goes out. Cut the breaker for the fridge, disconnect the cord at the top (it's a built-in and easy to access the power connection) pop on the extension cord I made with lugs and pop on the inverter and away it goes. Doesn't draw much power unless the defroster kicks in.

Re:did it for 'canes

[Xiterion]

I'm impressed you found inverters that would tolerate the startup load. In my (very limited) experience most inverters don't much care for the current draw of inductive loads like refrigeration compressors. I really like the idea of being able to run my generator for a few hours a day to recharge a battery during a power outage instead of having to constantly be around to babysit it.

Re:did it for 'canes

[linuxpyro]

A decent quality inverter should be able to handle the startup, but sizing it to be a bit bigger than you need is a good idea, as is making sure you don't skimp on inverter-to-battery cabling. Even better, if you are going to set up a bit of a larger backup system, is if you can use a 24 or 48 volt battery and inverter instead of 12. (Then maybe you'd charge it from a generator, or some solar panels if you want.) Less DC amps makes it easier to start bigger things.

Great idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

then when I dont show up for work, I can use a power outage for being out all day.
first my alarm clock reset because of the power outage and I didn't get woke up on time, then my electric car was dead because it didn't get charged overnight and it was supplying power to my house.

Outdoor night film shoots

[Woogiemonger]

This would be a dream come true for amateur filmmakers who need a power source for filming outdoors at night. Portable generators are either too noisy or too expensive. You can get an inverter for your car to supply 120V AC, which is a decent solution because cars aren't very noisy, but energy from a battery makes no noise at all, and sufficient energy for powering a house for a day certainly can handle 2000 watts of light for a night shoot. Amateur filmmakers normally have a day job, so they can afford a car like the Nissan Leaf... this is just an added benefit.

Re:Outdoor night film shoots

[vlm]

the pros mostly use those loud generators on the other side of the trucks with "welding grade" extremely heavy gauge extension cords.

Just sayin, in case you wanna try it on the cheap, you don't need to buy a new car, just some (expensive) extension cords.

The "rave" guys did the same for their audio. That's how I know. In that case, once the subwoofers get louder than the gens it doesn't really matter, I suppose.

Re:Outdoor night film shoots

[SirWhoopass]

Amateur filmmakers can afford a $35,000 compact car, but not a $5,000 generator? (Honda's 6500 watt, 52 db model)

Re:Outdoor night film shoots

[rev0lt]

2-3KW Gasoline generators are dirt cheap in construction equipment stores, and you can run them several hundred meters away from the shooting site. If you need more power, you can rent professional generators. Also, there are a ton of car inverters (used for everything from caravans to powering laptops) on the 100W-1000W range. Over that, you'd need to connect it directly to the battery because of the required current.
As for silent options, you have portable sine inverters such as Explorer XT (350W, good enough for led lighting), and a whole range of ruggerized battery lights from Peli.
Many outdoor filmmakers are now using led-based lighting, so the 2000W mark is a bit high.

Re:Outdoor night film shoots

[Shotgun]

2-3KW Gasoline generators are dirt cheap in construction equipment stores, and you can run them several hundred meters away from the shooting site.

Or you can just screw a 6ft length of steel gas line pipe into the exhaust line to make it all but silent.

Re:Outdoor night film shoots

[linuxpyro]

Another option is to take a normal car and add a couple deep cycle batteries and charge them from a battery isolator. These are used in RVs, and let you charge the other batteries from the alternator along with the starting battery while not letting both banks drain all the way down (so you can still start your car). Then get a big inverter and hook it to the deep cycle batteries. Of course, if you need a lot of power a dedicated generator may be easier.

Old news...

[grink]

I hope they don't try to patent this. It already has been done years ago.

http://priups.com/

Re:Old news...

[berashith]

since when does previous use prevent a corporation from patenting?

A few potential drawbacks

[grimmjeeper]

So I've been thinking about this a little and here's a couple of drawbacks I see:

1. Assuming you're using a pure electric car, using your car to run your house means it has no charge the next morning so you can't get to work.
2. If you come home at the end of the day with a mostly depleted charge in the batteries, The car won't be able to supply much power to the house before being completely dead.
3. You could use a gas/electric hybrid like the Volt or Prius to run this type of system. However, the charging system for the car is inside a garage. Having a gas powered car run in the garage is a "bad" thing last time I checked. Though a well designed ventilation system could help.
4. Cost of operation. Having your gas powered car generate your electricity is a horribly inefficient method. Dedicated generators are much more efficient. If you live in an area with natural gas, you can hook up your auxiliary generator to the natural gas supply and get your backup power much more efficiently.
5. Capacity. The charging/generating circuit won't be able to power the whole house. Sure, you could keep the fridge going to keep your leftovers from spoiling. But you probably can't run the whole house. A dedicated generator can supply more than enough power to run the whole house and still cost less to run.
6. Grid reliability. I live in an area that has more than enough capacity and a grid that stays up over 99.9% of the time. Sure, there are some people who don't have this luxury. And that's certainly a driving force for some people to want a backup. But most suburban dwellers in first world countries (the type who are the most likely to drive a Leaf in the first place since you need a grid like that to be able to rely on a purely electric car) share my luxury of a stable grid. When the grid is (almost) always operating just fine, why do you need to have a backup?
7. I'm not going to buy an overpriced car just to serve as my backup generator.

I'm sure that some people may have a use for this technology. But it's a niche market at best.

Re:A few potential drawbacks

[Arlet]

The charging/generating circuit won't be able to power the whole house.

On the contrary. An electric car has much more power than the typical house. Accelerating a 1 ton mass to 65 mph in 15 seconds takes 50 kilowatts. You can turn on all the appliances in a normal house and not get close to that.

Re:A few potential drawbacks

[Arlet]

Forgot a factor of 1/2 in there. It takes 25 kilowatts. Still, plenty to power a house.

Re:A few potential drawbacks

[JazzHarper]

1. Grid reliability. I live in an area that has more than enough capacity and a grid that stays up over 99.9% of the time. Sure, there are some people who don't have this luxury. And that's certainly a driving force for some people to want a backup. But most suburban dwellers in first world countries (the type who are the most likely to drive a Leaf in the first place since you need a grid like that to be able to rely on a purely electric car) share my luxury of a stable grid. When the grid is (almost) always operating just fine, why do you need to have a backup?

If you live in the US, you may be overestimating your grid reliability--it's not what it once was. With increasing automation, secondary distribution grids have become very good at rapidly isolating individual faults, so that their impact is minimal. However, that same design makes them vulnerable to multiple faults. When a natural disaster causes damage in many locations, the grid operators have to take down the entire system until everything is fixed. That can take one to two weeks, leaving tens of thousands of suburban customers without power, even if there is little or no damage in their area. Many people can tell you, ten-hour outages occur less often but ten-day outages are now more probable than they once were.

Re:A few potential drawbacks

[grimmjeeper]

Oh, the batteries certainly have the juice to do it. However, the charging circuit can't handle that amperage. I suppose if you attached a monstrous inverter directly to the batteries, you could possibly do it. But the charging station you put in most houses in Japan and the US can only support maybe 30 amps at 220/240v. That's a couple of circuits for lights and the fridge and you're tapped out. If you're using the standard household plug circuit, that's only 12 amps at 110v. That's not enough to run very much more than several lights. Perhaps if you plugged into their "Level 3" connector (125A @ 480VDC), you could draw enough to power a whole house. But that equipment is not cheap. The charging station for that level is over $16K and you probably can't install it in your house because it will overdraw the typical 200 amp service to a residence. Besides, you can buy a decent dedicated generator and have it installed for less than that. Hell, you could buy some dedicated batteries and a big inverter and chuck them into your basement and have a more practical, less expensive house battery backup.

Possible? Yes. Practical. Not a chance.

BTW, my information comes from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Leaf

Re:A few potential drawbacks

[grimmjeeper]

I don't doubt that. But the chance of that actually happening is still very low. Sure, it may start to get worse over the coming years. I have no doubt it will given how little this country spends on infrastructure maintenance. But here's the thing. Grid reliability is the only thing that lets people rely on electric cars. If the grid starts crashing more often, the draw for pure electric cars will vanish and most people won't buy them. Why buy a car that you can't reliably charge? The very thing that makes it irrelevant as a backup source (i.e. reliable power) would make it irrelevant as reliable transportation if it wasn't there. Either way, the Leaf is irrelevant as a backup power source.

Re:A few potential drawbacks

[silas_moeckel]

Using the leaf battery pack, I show it having 24kwh of capacity that will run my house for a few hours. Not massively useful that's only marginally better than the 5kw gen that will run my whole house save the electric drier.

Depending on the hybrid they can be efficient generators. The battery pack actually helps as it can run at max efficient output and charge the batteries with the excess and cycle on and off. This is one of the big potential advantages for hybrid work trucks.

Cost of operation is generally not an issue when talking about power redundancy.

A 240 volt 30 amp circuit is going to power most things in a house, probably not the central air, clothes drier or clean cycle on an electric stove but everything else. If these are getting installed as backup generators it's going to need a disconnect box and to move over only emergency loads. Fancier ones will even do load shedding.

I live an a US suburban area and a backup gen is a useful thing a good ice storm in winter can knock out power for hours and no power means no heat.

Re:A few potential drawbacks

[grimmjeeper]

A 240V, 30A circuit won't feed as much as you might think. That circuit could feed four 15 amp 110 circuits. That might power your fridge, several lights and maybe a TV. Forget an electric cooktop (usually a 220V, 50A circuit). Though you may be able to get away with just one burner. No way can you run your A/C system. Electric heat? Not a chance. You'd probably have to choose between running the gas powered furnace and the television (a hard decision for some I know).

30 amps just doesn't cut it for running a whole house.

Re:A few potential drawbacks

[Arlet]

Supposedly Nissan has developed a new charger that can be used for this purpose.

With modern electronics, the inverter doesn't need to be that monstrous. Similar kind of power electronics is needed inside the car to control the motor(s) already, and I'm sure it's not monstrous. And 30 amps at 220V is more than you need for a few lights and a fridge. A fridge is something like 300W. That's only 1.5 amps.

Re:A few potential drawbacks

[grimmjeeper]

It says in TFA that they are modifying the house charger to be two way. That's a 30 amp 220/240 circuit. The batteries can supply substantially more amperage but you have to actually get that out of the car to be useful. The "level 3" plug can handle it but there's nothing in your house that can use anything like that. If you wanted to build a system that took the battery power and converted it to usable current to supply the house, you're going to need a pretty serious inverter. To fully

supply a house you need probably over 20,000 watt capacity for a typical house running electric heat or A/C and a fully electric kitchen.

Now, the 30A 220/240V supply can be useful. But little things add up quick. Fridges can draw a lot more than 1.5 amps, though usually less than 5. Add in a computer, a satellite dish, a TV, lights, etc. and you'll hit that 30A cap a lot faster than you think.

Re:A few potential drawbacks

[Arlet]

30 amps just doesn't cut it for running a whole house.

My whole house has a 48 amp connection, and I rarely use more than 30 of that. I don't have A/C, and my stove and furnace run on gas.

Unfortunately, I don't have a garage, so this plan would involve parking the car out on the curb, and stringing an extension cord.

Re:A few potential drawbacks

[Bengie]

" most houses in Japan and the US can only support maybe 30 amps at 220/240v. That's a couple of circuits for lights and the fridge and you're tapped out."

I'm consuming less than 15KWh/day with the AC running nearly 50% of the time in this 90f day 80f night, 2 computers running 24/7, and a fridge.

15kwh/24hr = About 630watt/hour. I'm sure most circuits can handle a 3 amp average

This would be great for me, other than I would rather spent $30k towards a house so I can leave my duplex. Crappy duplex with 12amp breakers, virtually no insulation, and central air that needs to run about 1 hour to drop 1 degree. Can't even get thermostat to drop below 78f in this heat wave, it'll just run 24/7.

Re:A few potential drawbacks

[Arlet]

TFA also claims that 24kWh is enough to power a Japanese house for two days, so that's only 500 watts on average. 30 amps peak would be quite comfortable.

Apparently your 'typical house' (I'm guessing American) uses a bit more electricity than typical houses in the rest of the world.

Re:A few potential drawbacks

[Anonymous Coward]

My house takes about 2.5kW with 1.75 tons of air conditioning running. That includes the refrigerator, computers, etc. Since major appliances are gas, 240V @ 30A (7.2kW) could easily run my whole house. Electric heat and kitchens are rare around here. In fact, this house originally had only a 50 Amp breaker panel! Maybe couldn't run a hair drier, microwave, and vacuum cleaner to the mix at the same time, but that never happens anyways.
So in summary, this could be useful for people with gas appliances that don't want to buy an actual portable generator (those Honda inverter generators are rather pricey!)

Re:A few potential drawbacks

[Doctor Memory]

a typical house running electric heat or A/C and a fully electric kitchen.

I'm sure if your power's out you're not going to be blasting the A/C or making Thanksgiving dinner. You'll crank the thermostat to the edge of comfortable, put on some shorts or a sweater (as appropriate) and live off of sandwiches and cereal for a couple of days. Likewise, you won't be playing video games in 5.1 surround sound on the 65" plasma, or spending an hour in the shower every morning. It's just common sense.

Re:A few potential drawbacks

[TClevenger]

Now, the 30A 220/240V supply can be useful. But little things add up quick. Fridges can draw a lot more than 1.5 amps, though usually less than 5. Add in a computer, a satellite dish, a TV, lights, etc. and you'll hit that 30A cap a lot faster than you think.

I was able to run a gas furnace, 27" CRT, DVD player, Wii, desktop with LCD monitor, satellite DVR, fridge, chest freezer, gas stove/oven and several lights on my 5500 watt Home Depot Special without even a hiccup from the motor. I could swap out the furnace for a 15,000 BTU window A/C unit or a 1,500 watt space heater and still not have a problem. With the above load, the generator would stumble a bit when turning on the microwave, but it continued to run.

Re:A few potential drawbacks

[loshwomp]

However, the charging circuit can't handle that amperage.

True in Nissan's case, as they have a laughably tiny 3kW charger on board, but nonsense in the general case. The wall box in your garage is not actually a charger, nor is it a significant limiting factor for recharge power.

We've been doing this for a decade. The hardware exists, is cost-effective, and it works. As others have noted in this thread, what remains is primarily a distributed command and control infrastructure problem.

There is already a 50-150kW inverter on board (for traction motor drive) and the very essence of AC Propulsion's "reductive" charging patent is to reconfigure this inverter for use in a bi-directional recharge circuit. This equates to single-phase charging at ~20 kW and 3-phase charging at ~50 kW with little marginal cost of the traction inverter.

Re:A few potential drawbacks

[petermgreen]

A 240V, 30A circuit won't feed as much as you might think. That circuit could feed four 15 amp 110 circuits

If those 15A circuits were fully loaded yes.

That might power your fridge, several lights and maybe a TV.

All of those things take very little power unless you are peppering your ceiling with downlights or something. Probablly under 1KW between them. For comparison 240V 30A works out to 7.2KW

You probablly would have to do without whole house electric heating or AC (a single room electric heater or a window AC unit could be accomodated provided it was turned off when the electricity was needed in the kitchen) and be careful with the kitchen appliances and if you are in america you would have to be careful about balancing stuff between the two hot lines but it's nowhere near as bad as you make out.

You'd probably have to choose between running the gas powered furnace and the television (a hard decision for some I know).

bullshit

Re:A few potential drawbacks

[Firethorn]

It's more like a 30A 240V circuit could power your entire house EXCEPT for your AC system. It could probably do smaller house AC systems, but it'd have to be dedicated.

Should run an oven or even just a burner just fine, along with the lights.

Fridge: ~6A startup, 2A running
Lights: 60W equivalent CFL is 12-14W each, call it .2A each.
TV: 32" 1.75A max.

So you're only up to 10 Amps at 120V running a fridge, 10 lights, and a 32" TV.

You have 50A to go. You can run an oven and a burner or two off the remainder.

Re:A few potential drawbacks

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot one very important fact for your list.
Every battery technology has a finite number of charge cycles, Toyota has done very well with the Prius because they don't charge the battery to 100% nor do they discharge it all the way (I think it was around 60%?). If you use the car to power the house your just shortening the life of the battery pack.

Re:A few potential drawbacks

[silas_moeckel]

To give you an idea most homes have a 100 amp service and a lot more than 12 15 amp breakers. Like I said not the central air, clothes direr or clean cycle on the stove. A gas furnace uses very little. I can run all the lighting a fridge and a chest freezer the furnace and a couple beefy computers (gaming rigs) and a window AC off a 1850 watt gen (single 15). Were talking about power consumed not what the panel says state oven will only use anything near that while the clean cycle is running on the stove and all 4 burners are on high, granted resistive heating is just silly it's only upside is cheap to install (well electric ovens are great for cooking ranges are awful).

Re:A few potential drawbacks

[Bengie]

Good luck recharging your gas car with no power. Every time the power goes out, I can't buy gas, or even pump it if they allowed you to.

Why do you even need the car?...

[twistedsymphony]

... if this technique could save you so much money by shifting your power consumption to off-peak hours and providing a good backup power source during outages, then the car just seems like an unnecessary middleman. why not just have the battery cell and power converter tucked away in your garage, happily charging at night and dispensing during the day and clicking on when the mains disappears?

Re:Why do you even need the car?...

[scorp1us]

Residents are not* billed hourly rates, just daily rates at the most, eliminating the rationale.

Businesses are billed minute or hourly, so it makes sense for them, but they consume way more than the battery can put out, eliminating that rationale.

Re:Why do you even need the car?...

[ickleberry]

Because batteries have a limited shelf life. The power you'd use from this system is very expensive due to the wear you'd incur on the battery pack. There is also a loss involved in charging the battery and the inverter is only 80-90% efficient at best. Some people utterly cannot live without the ability to use the lights, TV, hair dryer for the few hours a year the power might go but for most it's not worth the added expense. You don't need a fancy hybrid or electric car either, just plug a cheap square wave inverter into an ordinary car or old car battery and you can draw some power from it, enough to dry your hair anyway and still have enough left to start the car

Re:Why do you even need the car?...

[Arlet]

I have a double meter in my house. The electric company puts a special pulse on the line, once at night, and once in the morning, that makes the meter switch from one counter to another.

You can choose between several tariff plans. You can have them switch the meter in the evening, or you can have them switch at night, or not switch at all.

These meters are very common around here.

Re:Why do you even need the car?...

[TClevenger]

... if this technique could save you so much money by shifting your power consumption to off-peak hours and providing a good backup power source during outages, then the car just seems like an unnecessary middleman. why not just have the battery cell and power converter tucked away in your garage, happily charging at night and dispensing during the day and clicking on when the mains disappears?

We'll see that when the current generation of EV batteries finally get to the point that they need to be replaced. When that Leaf battery finally gets down to 6kWh capacity, it will only drive the car 15-20 miles, but would be able to basically provide all of my peak power, while recharging itself off-peak. (Or, as a UPS, it could run the equipment in my office's server room for two hours.)

Re:Why do you even need the car?...

[GNU(slash)Nickname]

Residential time of use metering has been in use here in Ontario for about a year now. We pay one of three different rates based on time of day, weekday/weekend, and whether it's heating or cooling season.

Oops! Thought the Leaf was a hybrid!

[wisebabo]

My bad, I thought the Leaf was a hybrid (like a Prius)! So you're right, having lots of Leafs (Leaves?) would make things worse not better. However that's for society as a whole which is usually the last thing on the average person's mind around here. :(

As far as the affordability goes though, the wealth distribution in Vietnam is very bad. Lots of motorbikes but also some Mercedes, Bentleys and Maybachs. I figure anyone whose stolen... I mean made enough money to afford a car can afford a Leaf.

but!

[Anonymous Coward]

What problem are we really trying to solve here! the car or the house?

What about backfeeding the grid?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did they think anything about the fact that they are back feeding the grid? If you put power in the outlet that you are SUPPOSED to be getting power OUT of you will in effect be back feeding the entire grid unless you shut off the main breaker until power is restored. The power companies kind of frown on that and that is why NEC says you have to use a transfer switch so you can only get power from one source at a time. Thinking about this further isn't this built INTO a car so it won't do this? There must be......mustn't there?

Re:What about backfeeding the grid?

[ledow]

Because those people who have solar, generator backup, etc. are all blowing the grid 24 hours a day, aren't they?

You install a breaker (mandated by law in some places, for exactly this reason). That breaker cuts off the grid supply and powers the house from the car instead. Power comes back up, you switch it back over. You could probably even design a "smart" breaker that will do just that for you automatically.

At no point has anyone ever suggested that you pump power back to the grid (but that, also, is feasible - see how solar panels feed back to the grid), or join the two at the same time (because even if it's same voltage, it most certainly won't be the same AC phase and will blow the crap out of the street transformer's fuses).

Re:What about backfeeding the grid?

[mlts]

Why not just a plain old transfer switch? Mains power comes on, generator gets de-energized and stays that way until mains power gets cut.

This way, backfeeding is impossible.

By law, and common sense, having a transfer switch between a generator and a house is mandatory. Even on RVs with built in generators like toy haulers or motorhomes, they either have a transfer switch, or one must either plug the electric cord into the genny outlet or shore power.

Free energy!

[Anonymous Coward]

Use your car to power your house, then charge your electric car from your house. Voila: free energy.

You insensitive dolt!

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

My car is my home, you insensitive dolt.

Use an EV car as backup energy source

[rossdee]

Good idea if you have an electric car. But backup gas powered generators are a few hundred dollar to a couple of grand at your local hardware store.depending upon power output.

great

[schlachter]

seems like the obvious thing to do...leverage this gigantic battery sitting in your garage.

Dangerous if done wrong

[cavehobbit]

If you just try to plug this into a wall socket, you could feed electricity out of your house into the power lines people are working on. Something that idiots installing home-center purchased generators have been known to do. This is why when power generators are properly installed, they use cutoffs and safety switches between the house and the main utility meter to prevent back feeding power into the grid when nothing is coming in. Anyone that does this should only run a line from the car to an outlet strip to power a few critical items, unless a proper system is installed and inspected to prevent that back-feed.

Re:Dangerous if done wrong

[nitehawk214]

Not to mention, that I don't want to be trying to power the entire neighborhood from my personal generator. I would like to hope there are regulations that ensure a properly licensed person would be connecting a system like this, so the proper safety features are enabled. The 2 problems with this are:

#1 There are a lot of asshats out there that will try to connect something like this themselves and bypass safety features.
#2 There are licensed electricians that are asshats too.

Re:Dangerous if done wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

If you just try to plug this into a wall socket, you could feed electricity out of your house into the power lines people are working on. Something that idiots installing home-center purchased generators have been known to do.

This is why when power generators are properly installed, they use cutoffs and safety switches between the house and the main utility meter to prevent back feeding power into the grid when nothing is coming in.

Anyone that does this should only run a line from the car to an outlet strip to power a few critical items, unless a proper system is installed and inspected to prevent that back-feed.

I'm going to assume this message was directed at homebrew hackers with poor impulse control, and not at the Nissan engineers.

Re:Dangerous if done wrong

[cavehobbit]

Mostly. But if Nissan wants to do it right, they will only sell the system with the additional hardware needed, or some other way to discourage just hacking up a double-male plug to go from the gen to a wall socket. Don't get me wrong, it is a cool idea. But it could be a bad situation of someone screws up.

Re:Dangerous if done wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a moron.

Re:Dangerous if done wrong

[petermgreen]

If the people designing the system have any sense then it will only feed power back to the house when used in conjunction with a specifically designed base unit which manages the complications of safely feeding power to the house and possiblly to the grid (note: even if you want to feed both the house and the grid you probablly want to do it through seperate connections so you can continue to feed the house when the grid drops out).

Re:I remember when this was a fuel-cell discussion

[vlm]

Why not just...have battery powered LED lights for the short term emergencies (since that's all your car would cover well, anyway)

Uh, not quite.

My wife's prius generates about 60 horsepower.

conservative 60 hp * conservative 700 watts per hp / conservative 220 volts = sometime like 190 amps. Probably, with the help of the batteries, a short term surge of 400 amps would be possible.

Its an older house; I believe we only have 100 amp service. Technically I could run both my house and my neighbor's house across the driveway 100% full blast. In practice I don't think either of us own 100 amps of load; but then again running a car flat out full power for long periods of time is a bad idea.

Anyway in summary its quite realistic to run an entire house off a Prius. Not just some lights and the fridge....

Even my old saturn alternator supposedly is capable of a kilowatt of continuous sustained output, according to the high power ham radio guys. Thats... a lot of power.

What about my diesel BMW

[Anonymous Coward]

Any way to turn my diesel x5 into a florida hurricane disaster energy center for a few hours each day??

Re:What about my diesel BMW

[Overzeetop]

didn't they used to sell an attachment that bolted onto the rear axle of a truck that turned a generator?

done that

[confused one]

I used my truck to supply power for my house when Hurricane Isabel came through and knocked out the grid for the better part of a week. It makes sense, given the energy capacity of the battery in an electric vehicle, to consider them as an option for emergency backup power.

Perfect for rural U.S.A. as well

[WillAdams]

If you're getting your water from a well w/ an electric pump, when the power is out, so's your water.

It'd be a huge plus on why to choose a Nissan over another brand of car w/o said feature, and eliminates the need to store a generator, fuel for it, and have the special connection to make the generator able to power the house.

William

Even better...

[FridayBob]

If you had a hybrid -- of the type that uses an internal combustion engine only to run a generator to charge up its battery -- that would also be capable of feeding its power back into the household circuit, then you'd be able to power your house for even longer.

Re:Even better...

[Doctor Memory]

Do any of the Hondas do this? I had a Civic hybrid, and I think the only way to charge the battery was via the electric motor; i.e., the wheels had to be turning. That was a 2004 model, I'm sure they're on their third or fourth generation of hybrid systems by now. Anyone know?

Re:I remember when this was a fuel-cell discussion

[Bengie]

They have newer batteries coming out in the next 5-10 years that will store 10 times the power and charge/discharge 10-100 times faster. They already have working prototypes of full size batteries.

Lets see what kind of cycle life these have before we go around saying batteries are a dead end.

Lineman safety

[wfstanle]

At first thought, this seems to be a good idea but precautions must be followed. How many people will use this system without making the necessary alterations to your house circuit box? I had an emergency power generator and made the needed changes to disconnect the house from the power companies lines when the generator is being used. Without these changes, the generator (or electric car) will push the electricity out to the power grid. What a lineman (repairing downed wires) considers to be a dead wire could be energized by your emergency generattor.

Like many things, it is only a good idea if certain precautions are taken.

Re:Lineman safety

[EmagGeek]

This was my first thought as well. Even flipping the mains breaker off does not completely isolate the grid.

Every time I see some genius plug his generator into his dryer socket, I die a little inside, and a lineman somewhere could die a lot inside.

Re:Lineman safety

[linuxpyro]

If/When this comes to market, it will hopefully have some protection built in. In part, if their circuit sensed existing voltage on the output, it should shut off. Sort of similar to photovoltaic intertie inverters, though they're meant to run in phase with the grid and then detect when its down. Basically, the problem you refer to is called islanding, and there are some methods to avoid it. And of course, you can't always outsmart a fool, but some protection is better than nothing.

the possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

Ask a friend if you can charge your car while visiting and then sneakily save on your electricity bill when you get home?

Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean the large battery pack you charged from your house current can be used to return power to the house? Will wonders never cease?

This is one of those things that I thought was too obvious to deserve mention. I've ran systems that had UPS's in the 90's that used normal car batteries for storage. I'm a little surprised that this wasn't something that came with the car & charge point, instead of being touted as an advancement in technology after the car is on sale.

Not for the American Market anyhow...

[tekrat]

Guys, guys... This is a NISSAN leaf, not a Chevy Volt. This is a car developed for Japan and Europe, that just also happens to be for sale in California, tree-hugger capital of the world.

Japan *is* having an energy crisis, if you recall. Fukishima still isn't doing much and the power-grid there is suffering. Frankly, a slow-charging battery in a car that can be used as an emergency source for a power dump back into the grid during peak usage is a good idea for Japan, which isn't likely to be replacing their nuclear reactors.

And since Japan has no natural gas, no oil, no coal, and very few natural resources for energy production, solar, wind, batteries, geothermal, and other creative methods are going to have to be applied to make up for the gap once the nuclear energy production stops.

It's going to take Japan 20 years to overhaul everything that was affected by the tsunami. And by then, the price of oil will be so prohibitively expensive that those methods of energy production will be seen as non-viable. Japan has a much better long-term plan than the USA. While we make jokes or claim that the engineers haven't thought things through on Slashdot, it's much more likely that this is just a step towards Japan being energy independent, while we in the USA listen to the Tea Party bicker pointlessly while oil skyrockets and GM is still stamping out SUVs.

We're the ones who will feel stupid in just a few years.

Effenciency

[Anonymous Coward]

Battery storage systems aren't perfectly efficient, I think even the best commercial ones only get 90% That coupled with the losses from converting it back to 220V (from 12V) in most cases would effectively remove the "off peak" advantages to such a system in most residential cases. As a backup system it would probably be appropriate. There are attempts to do something like you are suggesting though. I have seen a prototype AC system that does much of what you suggest, it uses off peak power at night to cool a insulated tub of water. During the day the AC feeds its heat exchanger through the tub of cooled water instead of an air exchanger. The cost savings from off peak power and the efficiency increases from cooler night temperatures were showing significant cost savings last I heard. Though the question remains if the added complexity of the system was outweighed by the cost savings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_storage_air_conditioning

Re:Effenciency

[petermgreen]

For comparision the electricity prices from my provider are

13.36p per kwh single rate
16.23p per kwh dual rate daytime
6.28p per kwh dual rate nighttime

So if your storage is more than about 50% efficient overall then you would be saving on electricity costs (though other costs of the storage system may eiliminate the savings).

Images

[SnarfQuest]

When I read this, I thought about a large squirrel cage with the car running inside it.

Stuck at home?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't this sound like a really good way to be stuck at home with no transportation during a power outage?

A hack to get electricity from your car...

[hoppo]

You'll have to disassemble a UPS -- take the battery out of your UPS, and run lead wires from your battery to the corresponding positive and negative leads in your UPS. Voila.

You are right Re:Inefficient

[iamhassi]

"1 day, if we stretch it, but probably closer to 8 hours of normal daytime household load."

I read that too, you're right, this system is not adequate, and after 8 hours the car is dead because there is no gas engine in the Nissan Leaf to charge up the battery again.

This seems like a really bad idea, I'd rather they just put 7kw inverter in a car with a switch telling the engine to rev up enough to produce 7k of power with a larger alternator. An ambulance alternator produces 300amps at 14v, about 4.2kw. That's enough to run a 12,000 BTU (1 ton) A/C, a fridge, some lights (preferably florescent) and a computer.

this technology is non-patentable old news

[Anonymous Coward]

The US and other militaries have been using this technology for decades in submarines and otherwise... first with motor/generators (since ww2) and then electronics (since the 90s)

Unfortunately these non-innovations are just the type of thing that _do_ get patented, just because some entity decides they want to mass produce them.

The uspto and other ip agencies worldwide need to adopt a crowd-source style public review where the smoke and mirrors can be rendered useless.

Most real new technology was already patented by Tesla 100 years (before its time) ago anyways.

cool stuff

[hesaigo999ca]

Awesome to know this, in fact, if you have a few of them in a row, I wonder just how much energy you could actually generate. would be nice to have some stats of how much they can give back

10X the capacity? I'd like to know where!

[Firethorn]

Do you have a source on this figure? Big LiIon batteries are already more limited by the service of the house/building than by the charging limit of the battery, and the only 10X figure I remember about batteries would be EEStor's ultracapacitors, and to my knowledge they're still vaporware.

Does it work with nuclear reactors...?

[cyn1c77]

Because that might be useful.

Re:Does it work with nuclear reactors...?

[rusl]

only if you have bumpernutz

I like to recapture the heat from the exhaust

[sl4shd0rk]

When I am warming the car up in the winter, I hook the tail-pipe up to the dryer vent. The warm exhaust comes in through the laundry room and rises up to the second level bedrooms. It does make our clothes smell a little bit, but warms the house up nicely after an hour or so.

"prior art" by a prius driving geek

[Anonymous Coward]

See there: http://priups.com/

Grid security: why electric cars should be free

[Paul Fernhout]

http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/6cdc99eaaba91855/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en#09eb7f4c973349f2
"This essay explain why luxury safer electric (or plug-in hybrid) cars should be free-to-the-user at the point of sale in the USA, and why this will reduce US taxes overall. Essentially, unsafe gasoline-powered automobiles in the USA pose a high cost on society (accidents, injuries, pollution, defense), and the costs of making better cars would pay for themselves and then some. This essay is an example of using post-scarcity ideology to understand the scarcity-oriented ideological assumptions in our society and how those outdated scarcity assumptions are costing our society in terms of creating and maintaining artificial scarcity."

Electrical security is just one more reason. Electric cars can help in balancing renewable energy shifts in a smart grid, too.

I've been thinking about this, too

[drinkypoo]

Though Nissan is I am sure much more competent, collectively.

I want to build an electric utility vehicle (you know, a cross between an ATV and a pickup?) which can power electric tools and equipment.

Perhaps the smartest way to go would be to power it with something that can run off 110 or 220VAC, and put a grid-tie inverter onboard. Then the power converter can do two jobs. When it comes home it just plugs in and voila, it becomes part of the power system. A battery charger connected alongside the inverter would also be necessary.

Too bad inverters are so bloody spendy. I guess if you have a big expensive charger in your house already to handle the integration it doesn't have to cost you much more.

Re:I remember when this was a fuel-cell discussion

[dAzED1]

and it is coming out as DC. So, convert it to AC, and put it on your lines...you're losing lots of power in transmission and conversion. I never said batteries are dead - what the heck do you think is in the flashlight, pixie dust? A car couldn't handle normal draw for more than a short-term emergency, and during a short-term emergency...you can live off flashlights. That's all I was saying. If the power is out for your block, maybe you should live without an AC for a bit, perhaps. If electricity is out everywhere for a couple weeks, it isn't going to do any good for you to have a running frig when the town itself is dead.