Bi-directional car charging ...ie you can run you home with your EV when the grid is down.
The New Ford
F150 Lightning is the first main stream EV to be equipped with b-directional charging, but a phone call to VW confirms that the second release of their ID4 will also be bi-directional capable. All the other EV manufacturers should soon need to follow Ford's lead. Here is basic concept of how it works;
Your new Lightning is sitting in your garage and silently re-charging through a 240 volt outlet and suddenly the grid goes out ...and nearly instantly the flow will able to reverse and your truck will begin to feed up to 9,600 watts of power back into your electrical panel and keep your home powered. The base battery for the Lightning is 115 kWh and with just a little conservation that should be enough to power most homes for 3-4 days or more! I'm not sure how the Ford system will "island" the main panel so it doesn't backfeed the grid as the linesmen are working on it, but I'm sure they have something figured out that meets NEC code.
I placed my deposit for a new Lightning about a month ago and it will be hooked into my
Solaredge Energyhub system directly instead of into my main 200 amp electrical panel. The advantage of going this route is that it allows for direct array dc to EV dc charging. On a bright sunny day my 7.6 kW inverter will be able to convert a full 7,600 watts of solar power to 240 volt AC power and send it either to my main panel and export the excess back to the grid for credits, and if there is still more DC power from the array to be had it can shoot an additional 5,000 watts of dc power to my LG home backup battery and/or the Lightning. On a bright cold sunny day I'll have the potential to harvest more than 12,000 watts from the solar array.
In addition, if it has been snowing steadily for a week and there has been zero solar gain because of covered panels ...and I have depleted the stored power in both the LG home battery and truck battery, all I need to do is pull out my old 7 kW roll around generator, plug it into the EnergyHub, and run if for 5-6 hours to recharge both the home and EV batteries to full ...and then I can head to Cannon to enjoy the fresh snow without worries. Full power all the time!
More info on all of this can be found
here
Is anyone else beginning to become concerned about the effects of weather and cyber attacks on the grid? I'm certainly not a prepper, but the long outage in M'boro a few years back, the situation in Texas last winter, the gas pipeline shutdown down south this spring, and the Russian ransomware attack over the fourth have me convinced that we are heading into a new era and prolonged outages are likely to become a reality. My solar array, the EnergyHub backup system, and the coming Lightning will together put me in a place where my home energy and travel needs will be met ...even if the grid has been out for months. Good and bad, these are certainly exciting times