GRA
Well-known member
Or they could just take all the emergency precautions that government agencies and utilities have been warning them to take for decades now. You know, light (candles/lanterns and/or portable generator), cooking (portable stove and fuel), shelter, emergency food/water and purification, first aid kits, battery/solar/crank-powered radio etc., and be ready to hop in their car and evacuate if necessary. Of course, setting your house up to be capable of functioning off-grid is also a good idea, but if it's destroyed or you have to vamoose you need to be prepared for that. I've been through the semi-big one (Loma Prieta) as well as the Oakland Hills firestorm, the last when I was designing and selling off-grid systems. We were fine for power when everyone else lacked it, but we were also just outside the evacuation zone which could have been expanded at any time. So again, CHAdeMo V2H is a nice to have, but not critical. In a major emergency you don't need to be able to operate business as usual, but can power down and concentrate on the essentials, and a 2kW inverter is generally more than enough to handle that, barring an invalid who is dependent on medical equipment (ventilator etc.) - often you can get by with a lot less. As I'm a backpacker, my emergency kit is also my backpacking gear, plus the water and food I have stashed here.edatoakrun said:It is critical, for the millions of PG&E customers who got the same Email I did last week, and realize how dangerous, expensive, and unreliable the grid has become, and understand the asphalt grid is a superior method of connecting to supplemental electricity supplies. <snip>GRA said:...while it's a nice to have option, it's not critical.edatoakrun said:IIRC the MY '18 already has two 120 volt outlets, which I assume will be carried over to the '19 MY.
Not even close to the same effect as having access to all the energy stored in the both the pack and the gas tank, at a high kWh rate, through a CHAdeMO port.
Now, some individuals may need more - I don't know how deep your well is or what flow rate you require (and I'm long out of that business in any case), although if you really want to be emergency prepped you should build a tank high enough above your place that it can gravity feed and you aren't dependent on having power, which may or may not be possible for you. Not that that will guarantee you will be able to save your place. In short, you've got lots of options, and having a CHAdeMO-equipped car for V2H is only one of them. If you really need it, fine, but most people don't.
As for not being able to charge your LEAF, that's just one reason why BEVs, especially short-range ones, suck in emergencies, and why emergency vehicles should all be either plug-in hybrids or conventional. Anyone who's concerned about having to evacuate should never be dependent on a BEV and should have another vehicle, at least until you can afford a much longer-ranged BEV and always maintain a sufficient emergency reserve to evacuate.