If you’ve owned an electric car for a while, it might have occurred to you that theoretically, you could use its energy to power other devices. In fact, this is a concept that electric vehicle manufacturers themselves are actively working on, but is it a feature today?
You cannot use your electric car as a battery for your house yet, but there’s a good chance that you’ll be able to in the future. It’s a procedure that a few electric car owners have tried and even succeeded in, but it’s not developed enough to be used on a commercial scale.
In the following paragraphs, I’ll delve further into the concept of using your electric car as a power source for your house and what needs to happen to allow you to use your EV as a large home battery.
First of all, all-electric cars store enough energy for you to be able to use them as batteries. Roughly put, these vehicles are basically giant, moving batteries. They’re able to store great amounts of energy, enough to provide valuable backup power to a household for at least a couple of days.
| EV Model | Battery |
| Tesla Model 3 | 57 kWh |
| Kia EV6 GT | 77.4 kWh |
| Dacia Spring Electric | 26.8 kWh |
| Tesla Model Y Long Range Dual Motor | 70 kWh |
| Hyundai IQONIQ 5 Long Range AWD | 72.6 kWh |
| BMW i4 eDrive40 | 80.7 kWh |
| Nissan Leaf | 37 kWh |
So now that you do have the necessary amount of energy stored in the battery of your EV, how can you use it?
To use your electric car as a battery, you’d need to transfer the energy stored from your vehicle to your house. This is where the vehicle-to-grid or vehicle-to-home systems come in. These systems make it possible for electric cars to communicate with an electric grid.
Theoretically, all you’d need to do is plug your car into the vehicle-to-grid charger, and you’d be able to use the energy stored.
The benefits of using electric cars to provide power for your house are the ability to store unused energy from renewable sources, use the battery for backup power during a blackout, and provide energy to others.
Using electric cars to give energy back to the grid would have many benefits for you, your family, and the community overall.
Think of all the weather-related emergencies that have resulted in blackouts throughout these last few years. Many people would benefit if electric vehicles and vehicle-to-grid chargers were widely available and if there was a system to support this technology.
If you want to go a step further, the technology of using electric cars as batteries could be a crucial step for the shift to renewable energy resources. Electric vehicles will become much more valuable and useful if the option of taking backup power from them becomes a tangible reality.
We’re already seeing people going electric, but many more would follow if they could also use their vehicles to power their homes.
While electric vehicles can store large amounts of energy, and the technology to put that energy back to the electric grid is available, there are limitations that have prevented this phenomenon from becoming as common as most of us would like.
You can’t use your electric car as a battery for your house yet because the technology of vehicle-to-grid chargers is quite complicated. It requires a lot of hardware and software that a) may not be widely available yet and b) can be costly.
For example, you’d need an inverter to convert the DC coming from your battery to AC for your house. You’d also need software to control when the battery is saving power and when it’s giving power back to the grid.
To use the power from your car, you’d essentially have to disconnect your house from the grid. This type of control is essential — as long as your home is connected to the grid, you can’t really control where it goes. To disconnect your house from the grid, you’d need to buy specific hardware, which can be costly and isn’t widely available yet.
There are also a few other limitations for commercial use. Because this technology is relatively new, there are no regulations and plans to manage this shift at a national scale.
There are major companies and a whole infrastructural plan supporting the “old” power system, and it could take years to get the entire system to accommodate this new technology.
There are some DIY methods of using your electric vehicle as a battery for an emergency. These methods usually require some additional equipment and only work under specific conditions. But if there’s an emergency and there is no other option, the feature can come in handy.
You can also check out this video explaining how you can power your house using your electric car in an emergency:
Keep in mind that you won’t be able to power your house as you normally do, but you can power basic appliances and have your lights back on during a blackout.
The power needs to flow from the grid to the vehicles first, and when the grid demands power, it can flow back from the vehicle’s storage.
Vehicle-to-grid technology is relatively new, but it’ll likely become widely available soon. While in a typical electric car charger, the power goes one way (from the grid to the car), vehicle-to-grid (V2G) chargers can make the power flow in both directions.
