My Ioniq 5 has been a godsend. No, it can't power the house without dorking around with my electrical panel. But we can run the fridge, dishwasher, a few standing lights and keep phones and computers full charged.

I used a similar setup to Alex's but with the outlet in the rear seat instead of the V2X connector. I will probably by the V2X connector since it supposedly hanldles higher power draw.

And you got a budget opensorce powerwall

Best practice would be to build a separate structure and physically separate the battery from your house.

My experience with power outages (after big summer storms, not a hurricane thank goodness) has been that my neighborhood is impacted, but that places nearby have power. They tend to restore commercial first, so the supercharger near me is up and running before my house.

I am guessing that one of the use cases is a support unit to charge an EV just enough to get it to a charging station.

As an electrical generator, it's really not very good. The alternator is rated at 120 Amps (bigger than many, smaller than others).

At 13.8v, that's only 1,656 Watts -- on a good day, with the engine wound up. But the engine won't be wound up. It will instead be idling. The output will be less than 1656 Watts.

It burns right around 0.6 gallons of gasoline per hour (ie 22kW!) while idling and doing ~nothing else. It holds 21 gallons of gas.

So the unachievable best-case of idling-and-doing-no-real-work means that if it starts with a full tank of fuel, it will run out in 35 hours.

And in the real world, it will be doing work since that's the whole point of the exercise. It will therefore use somewhat more than its do-nothing 0.6 gallons per hour idle consumption.

We can ignore the longevity issues of treating a gas-fired vehicle as a stationary generator (these are expensive parts that are getting abnormally heat-soaked) because this is a temporary solution to a temporary problem, but as a practical matter: I'll still need to fill it up with gas, however I do that[1], about every day.

And, sure: That can be a way to solve some problems. With a decent inverter stashed out of the weather, connected with appropriately-big cables, I can probably use it to run the gas-fired furnace, the fridge and freezer, some lights, and some digital entertainment. Maybe it can't run all of that at the same time, but I'm smart and I'll manage.

The gas-fired car probably is useful, as long as I can drive somewhere and fill it back up.

---

Or: I could just plug stuff into an appropriate EV. It can sit there quietly being the giant battery that it is, and I can drive it out every couple/three days, or maybe just once per week as some suggest, to fill it back up.

It won't have an idle baseload of anywhere near the equivalent of 0.6 gallons of gasoline and it will therefore respond well to intermittent, dynamic loads like heat and refrigeration.

The EV is probably more-useful, as long as I can drive somewhere and charge it back up.

---

[1]: Sure, sure. I can carry a large quantity of gasoline to make the trips more-worthwhile. I can even store some locally (it's a pain to keep it fresh, but do-able).

If I were into that kind of prepping then what would be my practical limit? An extra 40 gallons, for ~60 overall? Great! Now I can run the car/house combo for 3 days before heading back out, and the EV still probably wins on this metric.

Regardless, the thing that’s really great for cost effectiveness is that the same large battery can be used everyday for driving and also used rarely for emergency home backup systems.

Ice storms/blizzards in the upper midwest can last days and make roads impassible to the point where they can't/don't fix the very many downed lines until the storm passes enough that they don't have to deprioritize rural roads and outages.

It's just not safe/possible to fix a line downed by ice when it's -30 out in blizzard conditions even if the trucks could navigate the roads.

This turns into the occasional several day outage for some folks.

I've also lived in parts of cities that essentially were impossible to have power failures absent very local equipment failures (like the power equipment attaching my building to the grid failing once) because the lines were underground and there was a power plant very close by.

It depends on a lot of things and lots of people assume everywhere else is just like where they are.

You can stockpile diesel for a generator (unlike electrons). That's what actual prepping looks like.

Take it from a Ukrainian.

Source: I've mucked up multiple small engines with bad stored gas.

I was remembering how critical infrastructure stays on. Most critical infrastructure is commercial.

However, a business park or an office block gets cut off with the homes.

And there's actually a good chance that PG&E is not being paid: most of the big tech companies have large solar installations covering the parking lot which power all the EV chargers, so they cut PG&E out of it entirely and produce their own power.

PG&E has special tariffs for meters that are used only for powering commercial EV chargers ("BEV1" and "BEV2"). They're about half of what a residential consumer would pay for an EV-only meter (the "EV-B" tariff).

Iceland (part of Europe) is the size of Florida with 2/3 the population of Wyoming. 20% of Iceland’s population are 1st generation immigrants. Neither of those facts prevents Iceland from filling in, upgrading, and maintaining their infrastructure. The two week power blackout which GP’s friend experienced is unheard of in Iceland. And every population center, no matter how remote and low population (we are talking fewer then 100) still gets broadband internet via traditional infrastructure.

I also want to note that I did not compare America with Europe, you did that. And it is a determent to your argument (as if your racism didn’t do that already).

the thing all american states have in common is their american ideology, their american political economy, and their population of americans. it just so happens that these are almost always found, coincidentally or not, alongside extremely outdated and poorly-maintained infrastructure, and a class of ultra-rich parasites hoarding many of the resources. drawing connections between any of these phenomena is left as an exercise to the reader