Fans of electric automobiles love the fact that they’re quiet, zippy and take far less maintenance than gasoline-powered cars. In principle, electrics are also more climate-friendly – but only where the electricity comes from clean energy. But now, reports Michael Lemonick at Climate Central, General Electric has come up with another plus for electric vehicles: they can power up your house during a blackout, like ones that disrupted cities during snowstorms and hurricanes last year. Although GE just recently introduced this new idea, the technology already exists. Just connect your Wattstation EV Charger for your car to your Nucleus Home Energy Management System to the Smart Grid and voila! Thanks to your electric vehicle’s battery, which is strong enough to push a ton of metal down the road at high speed, your lights will stay on even as climate change makes some types of extreme weather events more common and more severe — along, presumably, with blackouts. Alright, you don’t have all of that yet – but you can buy the first two, and the US is working to replace our current national energy grid with an energy efficient Smart Grid.
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Electric cars to keep the house lights on. Another plus for electric vehicles: they can power your house during a blackout. The technology (or some of it, anyway), already exists. All you do is connect your Wattstation EV Charger (you have one of those, right?) to your Home Energy Management System (check) to the smart grid (we’re still working on that). And voila! Climate Central http://www.climatecentral.org/blogs/charged
