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

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).

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.