Let me tell you about something that you hate. It’s stormy outside, absolutely raining like crazy, with dime-sized hail and ridiculous winds and a certain ominous feeling that something bad is about to happen. And honestly, something bad is about to happen. Not catastrophic, necessarily. I mean, your house is still going to be there in the morning, but it might not be a house with any power. Yeah, wicked storms can suck the life out of a home, and for most of us, that can mean a very difficult time living the lives we’re accustomed to.
Some of us have generators for these sorts of things, but not many of us do. What if more and more of us could, though, without having to actually buy a generator? Well, buy a Nissan Leaf, and that could very well be the case.
That’s because Nissan has developed a way to use your Leaf charging station as a generator for your home. When the power goes out, you can simply hook the two-way charger up to your car, and the device will draw power from the lithium ion batteries that normally power the vehicle to power the home. That’s good for about 24 kilowatt-hours of juice, which in Japan (where the technology was developed) could power an average home for approximately two days. Here in the U.S., however, where our carbon footprints are a little bigger, we’d only get about half that much use out of it unless we were being particularly conservative during the outage.
This technology will debut in Japan within the year, but Nissan hopes to make their new two-way charging stations available to other countries soon. However, before that can happen the device needs to be adapted to each country’s varying electrical system, which is something that could take some time.
Eventually though, this is something that will be available even here in West Palm Beach. Used car dealerships can preach all they want about the value of buying a pre-owned vehicle, but nothing is more valuable than a vehicle that can actually power your home in the case of an emergency. We all hate unexpected power outages, but to know that the solution to that problem is just sitting in our garage? Well, that’s pretty sweet.
