EVs and Power Outages

A line of severe storms swept through Northeast Ohio last Wednesday afternoon. Very high winds and very heavy rain took down trees all over the place and knocked out power over a wide area. I rode my bicycle through some of the heavily affected neighborhoods today, four days later, and I could hear generators running all over the place and literally dozens of utility trucks from all over the region were fixing power lines and clearing trees.

I passed a young couple who were carefully maneuvering a Tesla along a road that was littered with debris, and was down to one lane because a huge cottonwood tree was down across half the road. They both looked pretty stressed and annoyed.

"Just plug it in" to recharge unless the grid is down for several days in a row. Home EV chargers consume between 3-17 kWatts. My whole house consumes about 13 kWatt at peak consumption. That's everything running at once: A/C, the oven, dryer, water pump, water heater, and numerous lights and computers. We sized our home generator to handle that peak load; in retrospect we should have gone one size larger, but I'm not sure the natural gas supply to our house could handle that. (the generator is natural gas fired)

I think most EV owners probably just get a second generator for the EV if they already have one for the house. That's not such a big deal, I guess, but would still be somewhat of a pain to store and service periodically. A cheap ~20 kWatt portable generator is huge, heavy (~500 pounds), and about $4000, and is probably kind of janky. You either need a nice flat concrete driveway to roll it around on, or some heavy machinery to help move from the shed to the car.

Every technology solves one problem, but causes others, EVs are no exception to that, and are probably more infrastructure intensive and dependent than gas or diesel fired vehicles, since gas and diesel are very concentrated forms of energy that are easily stored.