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Posted at 11:00 a.m.
With climate change, power outages are likely to increase. Do Quebec building and electricity standards allow for an electric vehicle that would power the house in the event of a breakdown? Kind of like a big Tesla Powerwall on wheels?
Gilles Vinet, Blainville
Mr Vinet,
The idea you evoke is far from being far-fetched. It is even of great interest to Hydro-Québec. “Yes, it is possible to do so. This is something that we are likely to see appear more and more over the next few years,” said Jonathan Côté, spokesperson for Hydro-Québec.
The advantages of transforming your vehicle into a battery are numerous. Having your own power source during power outages, as you mention, is one of the most obvious.
But Hydro-Québec is also interested in peak management. Consumers charging their vehicles at night, when electricity demand is low, and then sending that electricity back to their homes during the day would smooth out peak usage and reduce pressure on the electricity grid.
Hydro-Quebec even evokes the scenario where citizens would return electricity to the network as “self-producers”, such as consumers who have solar panels, for example. The Hilo subsidiary of Hydro-Québec is working on these projects.
Before you can connect your vehicle to your home, there are certain technical prerequisites.
First, your car model must allow this. To find out if this is the case, we must identify the V2H expressions (Vehicle-to-home), V2G (Vehicle-to-grid) or V2L (Vehicle-to-load). Basically, this means that we must be able to get the energy out of the vehicle.
It’s becoming more and more common. The electric Ford F-150 boasts this possibility in some of its advertisements. Hydro-Québec also mentions the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and the Kia EV6 among the models that offer this functionality.
Nissan has also made an update on its electric vehicles that allow the function, and Volkswagen will soon do so on all its fairly new vehicles, again according to Hydro-Québec.
Another prerequisite: you must have a two-way charging station. The dcbel r16 terminal, for example, designed in Quebec, sells from $5,000.
Hydro-Quebec insists on saying that a certified electrician must put his nose in the installation.
“If we return electricity in the other direction, there may be security issues if it is not well insulated. Let’s say there is an outage in your area and you decide to power your home from your vehicle. If the system is not built correctly, it can send electricity back into the electrical wire that is in your street and represent a risk for Hydro-Québec employees who would come to do repairs,” illustrates Jonathan Côté.
What kind of range could an electric car provide? Jonathan Côté calculates that with a 64 kWh battery, common in several models, we could power a refrigerator, LED lighting and a few electronic devices in the summer for more than a week.
It obviously becomes more complicated in winter with the heating, the vehicle then risking supplying enough electricity for only a few hours. But there is always a way to reduce the heating to a minimum, to heat only certain rooms or to use a public fast charging station (if it is not affected by the breakdown!) to recharge your vehicle and continue to supply his house.
Remember that, in any case, the majority of outages are short-lived.
We expect these possibilities to fuel discussions over the next few years!