Power outage and Vehicle to Grid

[bwilson4web]

Hi,

A thunder storm front moved through town and took out power:

Our natural gas powered, 16 kW generator fired up, waking me, and house power was restored in about 30 seconds. In the past, I would use a 1.1 kW inverter in our 2003 Prius to provide power for lights, TV, and either a window AC or the gas heater fan. The power was out for an hour.

The point is a vehicle-to-grid configuration needs to be at least functionally equivalent to an emergency generator:

• SAFE - do not power the house service line when the grid fails
• automatic
• preserve lower limit - so the EV car can be used
• single home ~7.5 kW load

The Tesla connector frequently handles DC power loads of 120-250 kW as well as significant AC loads up to 80 A, 240 VAC.

A J1772 connector is frequently power limited to ~40 A @240 VAC, ~9.6 kW. The standard supports nearly double that, 80 A. Although the J1772 standard supports DC, it is pretty much used as an AC interface to the vehicle converter. The CCS-1 connector has dedicated DC power leads and typically handle up to 350 kW.

The AC-to-DC and DC-to-AC equipment should be located outside the car saving weight and allowing a bulky, high efficiency converter. It also needs to handle the safety interfaces to house and service line.

Bob Wilson

 

[DaleL]

The 2021 Ford F150 trucks have an optional generator function. In the future, I think it will make sense for other companies to provide a built-in generator function for both EVs and hybrid vehicles. I know I would rather not have to keep a generator in case a hurricane hits us. We lost power during hurricane Matthew for days and our streets were flooded with ocean water. Fortunately my little inverter generator was enough for the fridge, lights, and fans.

"Say you want to park somewhere remote and use the truck to power that camper. The hybrid 2.4-kW system will run for 85 hours on a full tank of gas at maximum load of 2,400 watts. The 7.2-kW system will go for 32 hours under the same max load conditions. If you’re not using all of those 7,200 watts, the system will continue for much longer, the company said. Normally, any Ford truck left idling and undisturbed will turn itself off after 30 minutes, according to Ford, via the built-in automatic idle shutdown function. But the generator mode disables this function, allowing it to go much longer, provided there’s at least a 400-watt draw on the system. So as long as the system detects that it’s powering something, the truck will continue to run."

https://news.pickuptrucks.com/2020/06/5-fun-facts-about-the-2021-f-150s-onboard-generator.html