I was at a multi-day music festival awhile ago and people were using their EVs as batteries for giant sound systems and other A/V (showing movies etc). Pretty useful to have a giant battery on wheels.
Giant battery, by the way. I’m not sure people will quite get the scale.
A 72" TV might take 150 watts. A third of a typical EV battery will power that for about… a week straight. Add in a mini fridge and you’re at 4.5 days.
Using an electric car as a buffer to capture cheap off-peak energy is something I looked into for our house. I don’t drive very much, so the car would essentially stay at home and do the home battery thing all the time - with the ability to serve as a car every once in a while 🙂
But there are two problems with this:
- I don’t want an electric car. Or any modern car for that matter. They’re privacy nightmares on wheels. And I already have a car in perfect working order that doesn’t spy on me.
- Here in the north, when the winter rolls in, peak hours is all the time. After doing a few simulations, I came to the conclusion that I’ll be dead before investing in an electric car to save on electricity bills pays off. It might become worth it if Trump or some other world leading imbecile makes energy even more unaffordable though…
You may just want to look into a whole home battery backup system. Other than the obvious feature of providing power during an outage, they can also be used as a source of power during peak usage times.
That’s what I do. Solar to batteries. Though friends with EVs use their’s for power outages all the time, which is useful because the region has volatile weather much of the year.
You’re shopping for a car that can act as a battery. You should be shopping for a battery that can act as a car.
a battery that can act as a car.
Can you point me to such a thing? I’m interested 🙂
There’s a long list, you just need to figure out which provides the most value to you.
Could always do an EV conversion on your existing car. It’ll cost about as much as a new car, but you won’t have to deal with all the added BS around modern vehicles.
Funny thing, that’s how I ended up with my current EV. I was pricing out an EV upgrade (taking an old EV, building it a new battery and adding fast charging), and for the price of just the raw battery components (batteries and BMS, no wire or anything), it was the price of my Bolt… But the bolt was done and cost no effort, and ended up being cheaper because I got a whole car for the price of the battery.
Yeah, I don’t get the same privacy as an old car but like… I actually ended up liking this car a lot.
I expect in most of the world that isn’t wild west, you can’t. It would either be illegal because that’s no longer a car that has passed approval and/or you would need to register it as a new car and pay some astronomical sum for that.
