Spain Plunged Into Darkness But Some Evs Turned The Lights Back On
Electric cars could help homeowners keep the lights on during power cuts.
Some EV owners in Europe made use of V2H charging during recent outage.
Think tank estimates 60% of an EV’s charge could power a home for six days.
Spain and Portugal recently experienced a massive power outage that left tens of millions of residents without electricity for most of the day. Lights out, appliances useless, Wi-Fi routers dead, the works. But for a small number of people, it was business as usual. Ironically, the reason they were able to carry on came down to a decision many might not expect: they bought an electric car.
Multiple EV owners in Spain posted to social media to show how they were leveraging their cars’ batteries to provide power to their houses. Some EVs such as the Hyundai Ioniq 5, have what’s called V2H or vehicle-to-home functionality, which means they can feed their charge into a home’s electrical system.
EVs with V2H can essentially function as giant versions of one of those portable power packs many of us rely on to keep our smartphones juiced on days out. Or the battery packs some homeowners with solar panels on their roofs already use to store excess energy harnessed during the day.
Not all electric cars support V2H, even though the technology has been around for years. But according to the UK think tank Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), an average EV with a 71 kWh battery and V2H capability could power a home for nearly six days using just 60 percent of its charge.
“As well as reducing emissions and saving their owners hundreds of pounds in running costs, EVs are also capable of adding resilience to their owners’ homes,” ECIU head of transport Colin Walker said. “More and more EVs are arriving on the market that are capable of returning power to the home. In an unprecedented blackout like the one we just saw in Spain, these EVs will allow people to keep their lights on, their fridges cold and their wireless routers running for days.”
Power outages can be frustrating, particularly if you, like me, work from home. They can also get expensive fast if you end up throwing out a freezer full of spoiled food. But more importantly, they can be dangerous. During a power cut that lasted more than a day, my 92-year-old father-in-law suffered third-degree burns when his dressing gown brushed against a candle he had lit in the kitchen.
Four months and multiple skin grafts later, he’s still recovering and it’s sobering to think he might have been spared lengthy hospital stays and permanent scarring if he owned an EV. Provided, that is, he remembered to charge it before the power went out…
