Ford F-150 Lightnings will soon offer home AC power, possibly cheaper than grid

You have solar. The truck covers night time, bad solar days, and use the truck to power other people’s freezers so they have food or electric chainsaws to remove fallen trees.

To the extent that the following claims are true, V2H makes a lot of sense:

- The battery in your vehicle is way bigger than you actually need for expected and surprise daily uses. You have at least a few hours warning before trips >150mi or are comfortable needing to fast-charge. - The lifetime of your vehicle's battery is longer than the lifetime of other components. This can be because of the afformentioned way-too-big battery, because intelligent charging avoids the 80-100% range, or due to new chemistries like LiFePO4 - The variation between min and max electricity price is substantially higher than battery inefficiency.

These factors seem mostly false for the first generation of electric vehicles (Leafs, etc.) but much more true for newer EVs with giant batteries. People seem pretty comfortable having a petrol car in their garage with less than 150mi of gas, so it's not surprising they'd be willing to do the same with an EV.

It depends on the expected time of power outages. I live somewhere with a fragile grid, but utility outages aren't necessarily disasters where you'll need to evacuate.

A lot of people have whole house generators, but they're expensive to operate and maintain, if your car can power your house for a few hours, that would be enough for most outages and then when power comes back you can charge the car again. You probably don't want to be driving in the kind of weather where utility power will be out for 48 hours. Doubly so at night. If you must get supplies, you would likely go during the day and the family would just have to deal with lack of power, same as status quo for most.

Reasonably sized whole house generators start around $10k, so rolling similar capability into your car makes some sense. A 30A 240v portable generator is a lot less money, but having it as part of your vehicle is way more portable. Personally, I have a portable generator for my well pump, and I'd love to pay a little extra for my next car to be able to replace that generator. I don't think I'll be able to have a car replace the 35 kW whole house generator anytime soon though; but that generator should have decades of light service in it.

During the end of a dry summer, large swathes of California have the power intentionally shut off for days at a time if moderate to high winds are expected. In those cases there is no emergency at all, so using a car battery works great.

As to your concern about the house losing power when you go on an errand, that is pretty much a non-issue because losing power for an hour or two will not cause food spoilage, unacceptable HVAC conditions, not depleted batteries in flashlights or electronics.

As far as range anxiety, I think it really depends on the location and types of expected disasters. For example where I live the top concern is earthquakes where you may need to flee a fire. In that case even just 10% battery will get you well away from the impacted disaster area to somewhere you could charge back up. In a place with hurricanes that calculus will be very different and this solution may not be a good idea.

As to your concerns about battery wear and replacement costs, I’ve been hearing that line since I got a Prius in 2003. The problem was way overstated then, and is even less of a concern now. With the exception of truly terrible design (Nissan Leaf) battery packs are very well managed now and will last quite long for the average user. In addition, almost no pack actually needs total replacement, there is now a robust and mature industry around refurbishing packs and replacing only the cells that have actually gone bad in a pack for significantly lower cost than total replacement. That industry will only grow and improve as the EV market expands.

other issues aside, why are people always so obsessed about what happens when "there's an emergency"? I remember 15 years ago, when unlimited-talk cellphone plans began to be price-competitive with copper-wire home phones, all these people were trying to justify having copper-wire home phone lines because of "emergencies". "What if the power went out? How would you call 911?"

Here in the SF bay area there have recently been a lot of power outages due to fire danger where it's just for a day or so. Nobody's evacuating, nobody has to go out for supplies, you really just want to turn the lights on, cook dinner, charge your phones, and keep your fridge cold. If you can power your home from your car for a day that seems quite helpful.

Part of this is that your fears about the time the battery lasts and the cost to replace it may be unfounded. Batteries keep getting cheaper, and over those 10 years, you might really only get down to 75-80% capacity (Tesla, for instance, warranties above 70% for ten years or 100k miles, and there are people with batteries at 300k now, they last much longer).

Batteries in cars that are ten years old now may not fare as well. But we’ve just seen this explosion of improvement in technology. Today’s batteries last longer, and tomorrow’s will last longer than that.

> Finally, a decade later (or less), you'll have to replace the vehicle's battery at a cost of $25K or more.

A decade or less? Where are you getting that from?

It appears to be a way to get a home battery without actually buying a home battery, because you can get a tax deduction on the work vehicle?

It's not a great idea when you could just get a home battery without blowing money on the integrated pickup truck.

There are plenty of rural areas with regular but short power outages.

If you can save your freezer and have a little bit of light that helps a lot.

In worst case you probably have a generator somewhere

> There's an emergency. Power is out. You use your car battery to power your home. You have to go out for supplies. Your family is left without power at home while you drive off into the darkness

As opposed to your family not having power both when you are out for supplies and when you are home?

It turns a power outage from an event where your family is without power for the whole event into an event where your family is without power during the intersection of the time of the power failure and the time you are out getting supplies.

For most of your other scenarios where you need to evacuate and your battery is 50% depleted because you were powering the house before evacuating that will usually not be a problem because most unexpected evacuations don’t require evacuating a great distance.

EVs these days have a lot more battery capacity than many people need.

Like, if my car is 50% depleted I can still use it for 3-4 days for anything I’d need to do.

Main point for me if the power goes out would be to keep the refrigerator and freezer going. Those will be fine if I go on a quick trip. Family will be fine too. We have flash lights. Seriously, I dot understand why you’d think that would be such a bad scenario?

Many people live in areas that aren’t all that car dependent anyway. I can just walk to the grocery or hardware store.

The size of modern EV batteries are so big that many people will likely see their batteries degrade due to age rather than charging cycles. I go through like 1-2 cycles a week, and those are 20-80% cycles of slow charging, so very gentle on the battery.

I would love to get some extra value out of that battery with V2H or V2G. I really don’t think it’ll shorten the life of the car significantly.

It’s possible that many early generation EVs need one battery replacement in their lifetime regardless. Isn’t it then better to have had some of that cost covered by making some money from V2G?

We’ll have to build more infrastructure but evening out the peaks and troughs is very good.

We shouldn’t have to build more capacity than we need and currently we have a lot of idle capacity most of the day because we build for peak.

Compared to current costs, yes. Power consumption will be closer to supply production curves instead of demand curves. Peak production is a massively burdensome level of production that requires significant over-engineering. It often requires significantly less efficient and costly technologies to be used. often times resulting it significant maintenance costs.

so yes. it would still be lower.

Yes, since to migitgate the worst of the climate catastrophe we'll have to get off fossils for electricity generation, and then we're dealing with supply peaks and through, instead of demand peaks and throughs.