(Source: Boston Herald)
John Sweeney of Harvard, Mass., has provided a tantalizing glimpse of the future. He hooked up his Toyota Prius to power part of his house for three days during the big December power outage.
Sweeney, an electrical engineer, told the Boston Business Journal he used an inverter to convert direct current from the car battery to 120-volt alternating current for the refrigerator, freezer, the fan for a wood stove, television and some lights.
The car ran for a few minutes every half an hour and "burned about five gallons of gas" while producing about 17 kilowatt-hours, Sweeney said. Thermodynamically this was not very efficient, but efficiency is beside the point in a power outage.
Hybrid cars cost more and their appeal is low when gasoline is around $1.60 a gallon as it is now - surely only a temporary bargain. The ability to use the car as an emergency generator for no extra cost would enhance appeal enormously, especially when the reliability of the electricity grid increasingly may be called into question.
According to some analysts, properly designed batteries in hybrid cars could help solve an old problem for utilities. They have almost no way to store electricity short of pumped storage reservoirs. (Suitable sites are rare. Massachusetts has two.)
If wind turbines and solar stations provide more and more power, storage will be more and more important and perhaps achieved like this if hybrid cars become common: Utilities could contract with motorists to use a small fraction of the batteries of parked cars.
Such contracts might even provide for the emergency generator function. A lot of folks in the Fitchburg area and in southern New Hampshire wouldn't argue with that right now.
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