California Utility Hacks Prius For Home Power
California's big power utility, Pacific Gas & Electric Co., today rolled out a prototype PRIUS HACK that lets you plug the car into your house to power lights, PCs and blenders. The Toyota hybrid has been modified with what they call Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) technology. You simply plug the Prius into a standard wall outlet, which charges the Prius batteries when the house has power, or lets those batteries power the house when it doesn't. Cool technology, but shouldn't the power company be working on preventing blackouts, rather than work-arounds for when the blackouts happen? Whatever. I want one.
3:05 PM * PERMALINK * 7 comments
Comments:
This is really nice, great for black outs. I wonder what this does to the life of your batteries. This car has a finite amount of battery cycles before the batteries get a very 'shallow' charge. The range of the car and I guess it's value for resale or trade in is reduced.
I wonder what the real 'net' cost of the power is here.
Finite cycles? No. Sorry. Don't believe the bogus PR from GM, Ford, or CNW Marketing. The batteries are warranted for 10 years in CA. Not only that, but the NiMH are babied by the charge controller. The batteries never drop below 20% discharge and 80% of maximum charge. Even the U.S. D.O.E. gave up after 160k miles trying to exhaust the batteries. For some of us, this Prius Hack has already been done by taking commercial grade UPS’s and slapping them onto the HV rails.
Just make sure there's a transfer switch in there somewhere. We can't have the car's juice going up into the grid during an outage... or someone could get electrocuted.
This type of "hack" should either be an option you get directly from Toyota or made Standard.
While they're at it, add a 120V plug inside the vehicle. I need it for a microwave oven!
Make it two plugs -- I have a blender, too. - Mike
Basically they're saying "Don't throw your money at gas station, throw it at us." Brilliant.
What a loony idea... draw down the NImH (or li) batteries below a certain voltage and you'll be well on the way to ruining them, not to mention blowing the warranty $$$. Those things are carefully babied with a computer controlled preset charge/discharge ratio. I think the Prius has 7AH batteries (could be wrong) but what are you gonna do with that piddly power?
Better go buy a few UPS or better yet a fuel efficient 3kw Honda generator with 220v output. During an outage pull the main breaker(you'll light up the neighborhood or worse, your lineman's life if you don't) and plug it into a drier outlet. Just to make sure, I use a cheap meter and monitor just to make sure there is absolutely no voltage on the other side of the breaker switch.
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