Your Prius Can Act as an Emergency Generator

Owning a Prius has more benefits than simply saving money on gas and lowering your carbon footprint – it can also get your family through a snowstorm by providing power. And while, technically, any car battery hooked up to an inverter can do the same thing, the Prius uses far less gas while doing so, meaning you can drive away when the storm is over.

The Harvard Press in Massachusetts reported that during a recent ice storm, resident John Sweeney ran his refrigerator, freezer, TV, woodstove fan and several lights through his Prius for three days on roughly five gallons of gas.

“When it looked like we were going to be without power for awhile, I dug out an inverter (which takes 12v DC and creates 120v AC from it) and wired it into our Prius…These inverters are available for about $100 many places online,” he wrote.

The device allowed the engine to run every half hour, automatically charging the car battery and indirectly supplying the required power.

The New York Times points out that what Sweeney did is essentially along the lines of “smart grid” technology.

The idea is that the battery of an electric car — a plug-in, in most smart-grid scenarios — can feed power to the electricity grid when the grid needs it.

Even President-elect Barack Obama has endorsed this idea, as seen toward the end of this YouTube clip in which he said: “We’re going to have to have a smart grid if we want to use plug-in hybrids — then we want to be able to have ordinary consumers sell back the electricity that’s generated.”

Of course, it seems as if Mr. Sweeney could have saved a bit of energy by putting his food out in the snow and ice – instead of keeping the refrigerator and freezer running in freezing cold weather – but what he did is smart all the same. Hopefully we’ll see a lot more energy efficiency breakthroughs in the coming year as people realize that we’ve been a bit wasteful in the past.

Link [The Harvard Press] + [The New York Times]

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