That $30k car could be an EV, too, and be part of the backup power system.
In Australia, $10k would buy not only a ton of solar panels but also batteries. The US has decided to make solar and batteries at the home super expensive, unnecessarily.
What you've shown is that there is a crossover where a gas car + generator beats an electric car.
That doesn't mean electric cars shouldn't be considered as power backup, or that buying a nice electric car vs a nice gas car doesn't come with the added benefit of "Don't need a 10k generator anymore".
> That doesn't mean electric cars shouldn't be considered as power backup, or that buying a nice electric car vs a nice gas car doesn't come with the added benefit of "Don't need a 10k generator anymore".
From redundancy perspective, a genset + car is hands down a better combo. A functional ICE car is cheaper and goes everywhere without any trip planning around charging stations, which is another plus.
If cost is your only factor yes. But the vast majority of people pick cars they like, and EV's are great. No need to dog on them needlessly. The trip planning thing is super overblown. Now 2 years into my first EV, going to a charger that's not my house _at all_ is quite rare - couple times a year; even when I travel Portland to Seattle, I don't have to stop on the way such that outside Olympia, I don't even know where the charge stations are. And that's the worst it'll ever be.
> and EV's are great. No need to dog on them needlessly. The trip planning thing is super overblown.
I never said EV is not great and it is nice that it is working out for you, but facts are facts. Also, while EV footprint is growing around the globe, there is wide vast world beyond USA where charging issue is still true (and the repair shops).
There's a vast world in the US where charging is still an issue. I live in an apartment in a major city with no garage or parking lot, so owning an EV would be very difficult, since there's no way to charge residentially. Or if you're on call, in a rural area, where charging at home might not leave you with enough charge to drive across the county without notice.
ICE cars are barely cheaper, almost never over any span of time due to cost of ownership, and there's no trip planning around charging. It's clear you've never done a road trip in a Tesla. Almost all Tesla owners have had ICE cars first, not sure who you're trying to convince here with your lies.
I mean presenting one set of tradeoffs just shows that there are tradeoffs.
If you're looking at two $55,000 cars, and one has power interconnect and one does not, it's not like adding a $1000-$10,000 generator on top is somehow immediately better unless you're adding in factors that make it better (like buying a cheaper car). There's 3 or 4 superchargers within a few miles of my house, and every time I've lost power I could easily go charge my car so I never worried about that.
Not everyone lives in that situation or has the same "one or two days without local power but chargers still work" threat model. It just so happens that's been the biggest actual, real, problem that my car could have fixed for me.
Carmax has used 2025 SEL Ioniq 5's with 10-15k miles for 33k; that's practically new. Other than the ICCU issue, probably the best electric deal rn? 84kwh battery, I've can drive it Portland to Seattle on 2/3 of a charge.
My generator was $1000 and can power my entire house (including server rack). If I bought it used it would’ve been $500. I can trivially store 2 weeks worth of gasoline (and I do, constantly) and as long as somewhere within 700km of my house has gasoline I can get there, refill, and get home. I own 6 gas cars and they total less than $33k. My daily I paid $2500 for and average 6L/100km. (All CAD) If you start taking used cars into account the math goes waaaaaay towards gasoline car + generator.
I don't think there's a pure cost argument that favors EV's in this scenario. I think instead the argument is, EV's are relatively affordable now and have other benefits. For context, the Ioniq 5 is rated Edmund's _best_ EV SUV (afaik, most popular overall category). So e.g. this isn't an example of a crappy one to make na argument (I've owned it for 2 years, my first EV, its v. impressive).
So for someone who wants an EV (for the convenience, environment, or performance reasons), I think the statement is you can e.g. do so fairly affordably and also get free generator with it. Its a nice perk imo.
Does this also factor in operating costs of the vehicle? Especially considering gasoline at $4-7/gallon?
Then there’s also the potential scenario of “buyer prefers an EV anyway.”
In my case I’m currently driving a ~10 year old conventional gasoline vehicle that I purchased new, and I plan to keep driving it for roughly another 7-10 years. Given the current automotive product lineups out there I can’t think of a scenario where my next car will involve gasoline regardless of my desire for a backup power source at home.
> Does this also factor in operating costs of the vehicle? Especially considering gasoline at $4-7/gallon?
Depends on the vehicle of course. But for me at least, my 5-speed Civic for $2500 is way cheaper over its expected lifespan than a $7000 Nissan Leaf (and the Civic is way more flexible, since it can actually go more than 100km every 6 hours in the winter). At $1.50/L and 6L/100km, I can drive about 50,000km before I spend more on gasoline than the price difference between the two. The actual breakeven math (assuming 21kWh/100km) is closer to about 65,000km when factoring in electricity at ~$0.12/kWh. Oil changes are negligible (I do my own maintenance and oil changes), and a used Leaf is going to have just as many problems (if not more) with "the rest of the car" as a gas car (suspension, steering, brakes, tires, electrics, interior components, not to mention battery pack services).
If you buy a nicer EV than the break even point goes even further out. At least where I am, the EV equivalent of any gasoline car has a breakeven point of at least 50k km driven, usually more.
> Then there’s also the potential scenario of “buyer prefers an EV anyway.”
Entirely fair, but I'd still buy a generator and an EV. Because coupling your house power to your car just seems like a bad idea (to rely on it, at least; if you live somewhere that you never need to rely on off-grid power, then who really cares). For instance, my house has a sump pump that must run every ~hour or my basement will flood, and during storms that gets down to about 20 minutes. If my area doesn't have power, then I can't charge an EV anywhere nearby, and if I'm powering the house off the EV, how am I going to recharge it without my basement flooding?
I think you’re a huge outlier here. The median person is not doing their own maintenance and oil changes. $2,500 Civic that runs reliably is a meaningless data point. I might as well say I found 128GB of DDR5 RAM at an estate sale for $20.
50km-75km break-even is not a whole lot of kilometers.
You can compare a used first gen leaf’s poor range but in a short amount of time from now the bulk of the used EV market is going to be Teslas and Ioniq 5s that charge fast, are equipped with heat pumps, and get plenty of range.
Not everyone has a sump pump that needs to run every hour. Not everyone even has a basement. If we keep throwing out qualifiers we end up with a scenario that is not relevant to many people.
Out of curiosity, what do you normally do about the gasoline? I ask because I had a crappy little generator, and it seemed like my most common issue was old gas in the thing. Wasn’t a big deal or anything, just curious… stabil and run them regularly whether you need it or not?
Fortunately there's a couple (literally 2) gas stations near me that sell ethanol-free 91 octane gas, which has a shelf life of ~1 year. Sta-bil in theory extends that substantially longer. My solution is Sta-bil in the E0 gas, which gets used throughout the year for small engines (lawn mower, snowblower, pressure washer) and the generator if needed. I power up the generator once a month to make sure its battery stays charged and fuel keeps flowing (probably overkill). My power goes out 2-3 times a year, so that combined with the small engine stuff is enough to cycle through the gas in ~1 year, but if it isn't, I'll either burn it in the generator or just run it in one of my cars.
If you live in an area where you can only get ethanol gas, then you definitely don't want it sitting more than 6 months, even with Sta-bil (in my experience). So that means yeah, you gotta cycle through the generator's tank twice a year, which if you live in an area with reliable power, means spending more money than you need to on gas and oil. Also, keep all containers (including fuel tanks) as full as possible, to minimize the amount of air in the container, to minimize the amount of moisture the ethanol can suck out of the air.
The cost of my 2015 Subaru Forester is apparently around 7k. A gas powered generator is 2-3k (and can be refilled with quick trips to the nearest usable gas station) and you can also pair it with a solar-powered one with panels for 3k.
That puts the total setup price to about 10% of a CT-Energy station.
And I could buy a hybrid that's only a few years old for 20k? I mean, it's still a magnitude less than the CT which is what I'm responding to. The idea that the CT miraculously saved a certain family from disaster and was thus worth the 100k investment is just silly.
I am confused why you think I’m defending the Cybertruck, I’m saying that a used ~$20k EV plus the equipment needed to hook it up to your house would probably satisfy most people’s desire for a generator.
Personally I never really understood the value of a generator in the first place but that’s just my opinion.
I have a champion tri-fuel that cost < $1k which runs essentially my whole house. It's plumbed into my natural gas so as long as that is up (it has never gone out), I don't even have to refill it.
I read somewhere that it's a big deal if a natural gas network runs out of gas because then air can get into the system. That can lead to explosions, so they have to systematically purge the entire network.
We have the same. $2K generator, while house transfer switch, natural gas hookup. Guess we'll never have a power failure again, since we just got a new generator.
See, your problem is assuming that the EV is 80-100K. Or that the ICE car is 30K. This is a contrived comparison. An average new car is well over 30K. And I bought a brand new Lightning for 50K. Being able to use 131kWh of battery for things other than driving is a pleasant bonus, and I prefer it to having a gas generator I have to keep maintained and store fuel for.
You an drive almost every EV that has that feature too.
Or rather, you can take half of the difference in price and install some proper PV + battery system in your house that can be used when there's isn't a catastrophe too.
Sounds like you're desperately searching for a problem where a specific make and model of a car can fit as a solution. That doesn't make the car any better than it is.
It is an emergency. I'll compromise in an emergency. My fridge can sit unpowered for a couple hours while I'm driving, and that is all I need to drive anyway.
If there is a major outage most bosses understand that you won't be working normally because you need to deal with the emergency.
The amount of money you spent on a cybertruck could’ve instead been spent on a generator, gasoline for the generator, and a car to go buy gasoline for the generator. Or, battery packs & solar panels, and a generator, and gasoline for the generator, and a car to go buy gasoline for the generator. That car could even be an EV, just a much more efficient one.
I don't think anyone buys a cybertruck for this ability. But if you have one this is a nice bonus and the additions too use it this was are less than a generator
The power being delivered on wheels that go with you is the whole point. A permanently affixed generator doesn't help get power out into the middle of the field when I need to do things like weld farm equipment. There are plenty of solutions out there, but the power source and truck carrying the tools being one and the same would be quite attractive if the aforementioned problems were solved.
Exactly why the power source being the truck I already own anyway is far more appealing, at least it would be if the aforementioned problems were solved. Special tools come with special costs that don't really make sense most of the time.
This is obviously not the primary reason to get a Telsa. But a full home generator will run you $15k to buy and install where i live, and a whole bunch of hassle to install with permits. I don't have one because my power doesn't go out that much. But if i'm otherwise on the fence about a vehicle, I would absolutely want this as a feature.
Maybe a generator sized to run a regular home in perpetuity, but I bet it's much, much less than that to have an electrician install a GenerLink and to buy a regular portable generator just powerful enough to run your fridge and freezer.
In our area, when a storm hit, the roads washed out, so the generators ran out of propane. Then the local propane companies ran out of delivery truck capacity because of the demand surge. Finally, the regional distributors ran out of propane.
Our solar panels kept the fridge running, but we were heating the house with a wood stove (it was very cloudy, so we were getting maybe an hour of sun a day). If we had bidirectional house charging, we could have had warm showers + used the heat pump: We would have been able to fast-charge the car at 100-200kw in town. The house can limp through 20-30 hours on ~ 25kwh, so the charger would charge the house at a few days per hour, including losses from driving to and from town + round tripping through the battery, and also running the house heat pump.
None of the other people around here stayed online. Some propane-dependent people had no electricity for > 2 weeks (with rationing, they managed to keep their generators online for about a week, and PG&E took three weeks to fix their lines).
This was in the outskirts of Silicon Valley, so better-than-puerto-rico infrastructure, but only just.
This is a total failure/incompetence of multiple utility institutions that we all pay for and depend on. An electric company that does not have the capacity to respond quickly to natural disasters and propane delivery infrastructure that doesn't have the reserves to weather such an event. Even a day without electricity should be unacceptable in a modern, functional society. How do we tolerate 2 weeks? I bet the CEOs of these companies are not going without electricity for 2 weeks.
We are far away from, but slowly approaching, Mad Max levels of institutional failure, and everyone seems to treat it as normal and unavoidable.
> This is a total failure/incompetence of multiple utility institutions that we all pay for and depend on. Even a day without electricity should be unacceptable in a modern, functional society.
Like the storm surge walls at Fukushima, all infrastructure is designed with a certain size of storm or event in mind based on historical averages and outliers.
Climate change is throwing all that to shit.
Your comment says plain and clear you’ve never lived through a “once in 100 years” level event more than once in a decade, and you don’t realize how much it would cost to upgrade what we’ve spent ~100 years building.
It’s trillions, just to get started.
I also wonder if you’d be fine with increasing taxes to pay for all that, or if you already complain about “high taxes”
You forgot "higher maintenance" that goes along with seldom-used things that run on gas. That gas doesn't drain itself, and if you don't do that, well, Amazon has carbs for Honda generators for $30. For something I might use once a year. No, thanks.
But can they also be driven?
You can drive a $30K car and have a $10K backup power system.
An $80K-100K car that replaces the two isn't some genius purchase.
Sure you can spend all the money you want on a luxury toy, nothing wrong with it, but it's weird trying to justify it as anything but that.
That $30k car could be an EV, too, and be part of the backup power system.
In Australia, $10k would buy not only a ton of solar panels but also batteries. The US has decided to make solar and batteries at the home super expensive, unnecessarily.
What you've shown is that there is a crossover where a gas car + generator beats an electric car.
That doesn't mean electric cars shouldn't be considered as power backup, or that buying a nice electric car vs a nice gas car doesn't come with the added benefit of "Don't need a 10k generator anymore".
> That doesn't mean electric cars shouldn't be considered as power backup, or that buying a nice electric car vs a nice gas car doesn't come with the added benefit of "Don't need a 10k generator anymore".
From redundancy perspective, a genset + car is hands down a better combo. A functional ICE car is cheaper and goes everywhere without any trip planning around charging stations, which is another plus.
If cost is your only factor yes. But the vast majority of people pick cars they like, and EV's are great. No need to dog on them needlessly. The trip planning thing is super overblown. Now 2 years into my first EV, going to a charger that's not my house _at all_ is quite rare - couple times a year; even when I travel Portland to Seattle, I don't have to stop on the way such that outside Olympia, I don't even know where the charge stations are. And that's the worst it'll ever be.
> and EV's are great. No need to dog on them needlessly. The trip planning thing is super overblown.
I never said EV is not great and it is nice that it is working out for you, but facts are facts. Also, while EV footprint is growing around the globe, there is wide vast world beyond USA where charging issue is still true (and the repair shops).
There's a vast world in the US where charging is still an issue. I live in an apartment in a major city with no garage or parking lot, so owning an EV would be very difficult, since there's no way to charge residentially. Or if you're on call, in a rural area, where charging at home might not leave you with enough charge to drive across the county without notice.
ICE cars are barely cheaper, almost never over any span of time due to cost of ownership, and there's no trip planning around charging. It's clear you've never done a road trip in a Tesla. Almost all Tesla owners have had ICE cars first, not sure who you're trying to convince here with your lies.
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I mean presenting one set of tradeoffs just shows that there are tradeoffs.
If you're looking at two $55,000 cars, and one has power interconnect and one does not, it's not like adding a $1000-$10,000 generator on top is somehow immediately better unless you're adding in factors that make it better (like buying a cheaper car). There's 3 or 4 superchargers within a few miles of my house, and every time I've lost power I could easily go charge my car so I never worried about that.
Not everyone lives in that situation or has the same "one or two days without local power but chargers still work" threat model. It just so happens that's been the biggest actual, real, problem that my car could have fixed for me.
Yes, the crossover point is around $5-10k more than an ice vehicle, assuming the electric vehicle powers a house just as well as a gas generator does.
The cybertruck costs roughly $82k, which is about 40-50k more than other pickup trucks.
For the same price, you could install 2 1000-gallon propane tanks and enough gasoline to power your backup generator for a year nonstop.
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An Ioniq 5 is not a $80-100k car, though. The difference in cost between it and an equivalent gas car is less than $10k.
Carmax has used 2025 SEL Ioniq 5's with 10-15k miles for 33k; that's practically new. Other than the ICCU issue, probably the best electric deal rn? 84kwh battery, I've can drive it Portland to Seattle on 2/3 of a charge.
My generator was $1000 and can power my entire house (including server rack). If I bought it used it would’ve been $500. I can trivially store 2 weeks worth of gasoline (and I do, constantly) and as long as somewhere within 700km of my house has gasoline I can get there, refill, and get home. I own 6 gas cars and they total less than $33k. My daily I paid $2500 for and average 6L/100km. (All CAD) If you start taking used cars into account the math goes waaaaaay towards gasoline car + generator.
I don't think there's a pure cost argument that favors EV's in this scenario. I think instead the argument is, EV's are relatively affordable now and have other benefits. For context, the Ioniq 5 is rated Edmund's _best_ EV SUV (afaik, most popular overall category). So e.g. this isn't an example of a crappy one to make na argument (I've owned it for 2 years, my first EV, its v. impressive).
So for someone who wants an EV (for the convenience, environment, or performance reasons), I think the statement is you can e.g. do so fairly affordably and also get free generator with it. Its a nice perk imo.
Does this also factor in operating costs of the vehicle? Especially considering gasoline at $4-7/gallon?
Then there’s also the potential scenario of “buyer prefers an EV anyway.”
In my case I’m currently driving a ~10 year old conventional gasoline vehicle that I purchased new, and I plan to keep driving it for roughly another 7-10 years. Given the current automotive product lineups out there I can’t think of a scenario where my next car will involve gasoline regardless of my desire for a backup power source at home.
> Does this also factor in operating costs of the vehicle? Especially considering gasoline at $4-7/gallon?
Depends on the vehicle of course. But for me at least, my 5-speed Civic for $2500 is way cheaper over its expected lifespan than a $7000 Nissan Leaf (and the Civic is way more flexible, since it can actually go more than 100km every 6 hours in the winter). At $1.50/L and 6L/100km, I can drive about 50,000km before I spend more on gasoline than the price difference between the two. The actual breakeven math (assuming 21kWh/100km) is closer to about 65,000km when factoring in electricity at ~$0.12/kWh. Oil changes are negligible (I do my own maintenance and oil changes), and a used Leaf is going to have just as many problems (if not more) with "the rest of the car" as a gas car (suspension, steering, brakes, tires, electrics, interior components, not to mention battery pack services).
If you buy a nicer EV than the break even point goes even further out. At least where I am, the EV equivalent of any gasoline car has a breakeven point of at least 50k km driven, usually more.
> Then there’s also the potential scenario of “buyer prefers an EV anyway.”
Entirely fair, but I'd still buy a generator and an EV. Because coupling your house power to your car just seems like a bad idea (to rely on it, at least; if you live somewhere that you never need to rely on off-grid power, then who really cares). For instance, my house has a sump pump that must run every ~hour or my basement will flood, and during storms that gets down to about 20 minutes. If my area doesn't have power, then I can't charge an EV anywhere nearby, and if I'm powering the house off the EV, how am I going to recharge it without my basement flooding?
I think you’re a huge outlier here. The median person is not doing their own maintenance and oil changes. $2,500 Civic that runs reliably is a meaningless data point. I might as well say I found 128GB of DDR5 RAM at an estate sale for $20.
50km-75km break-even is not a whole lot of kilometers.
You can compare a used first gen leaf’s poor range but in a short amount of time from now the bulk of the used EV market is going to be Teslas and Ioniq 5s that charge fast, are equipped with heat pumps, and get plenty of range.
Not everyone has a sump pump that needs to run every hour. Not everyone even has a basement. If we keep throwing out qualifiers we end up with a scenario that is not relevant to many people.
> 5-speed Civic for $2500
Good grief, what year is that Civic from? LOL. I just bought a 10 year old Corolla for my kid and it was 12 grand. Civics aren't much cheaper.
Out of curiosity, what do you normally do about the gasoline? I ask because I had a crappy little generator, and it seemed like my most common issue was old gas in the thing. Wasn’t a big deal or anything, just curious… stabil and run them regularly whether you need it or not?
Fortunately there's a couple (literally 2) gas stations near me that sell ethanol-free 91 octane gas, which has a shelf life of ~1 year. Sta-bil in theory extends that substantially longer. My solution is Sta-bil in the E0 gas, which gets used throughout the year for small engines (lawn mower, snowblower, pressure washer) and the generator if needed. I power up the generator once a month to make sure its battery stays charged and fuel keeps flowing (probably overkill). My power goes out 2-3 times a year, so that combined with the small engine stuff is enough to cycle through the gas in ~1 year, but if it isn't, I'll either burn it in the generator or just run it in one of my cars.
If you live in an area where you can only get ethanol gas, then you definitely don't want it sitting more than 6 months, even with Sta-bil (in my experience). So that means yeah, you gotta cycle through the generator's tank twice a year, which if you live in an area with reliable power, means spending more money than you need to on gas and oil. Also, keep all containers (including fuel tanks) as full as possible, to minimize the amount of air in the container, to minimize the amount of moisture the ethanol can suck out of the air.
The cost of my 2015 Subaru Forester is apparently around 7k. A gas powered generator is 2-3k (and can be refilled with quick trips to the nearest usable gas station) and you can also pair it with a solar-powered one with panels for 3k.
That puts the total setup price to about 10% of a CT-Energy station.
That’s a used car that’s more than halfway through the median lifespan of a vehicle.
We could start comparing used EVs if we want to.
And I could buy a hybrid that's only a few years old for 20k? I mean, it's still a magnitude less than the CT which is what I'm responding to. The idea that the CT miraculously saved a certain family from disaster and was thus worth the 100k investment is just silly.
I am confused why you think I’m defending the Cybertruck, I’m saying that a used ~$20k EV plus the equipment needed to hook it up to your house would probably satisfy most people’s desire for a generator.
Personally I never really understood the value of a generator in the first place but that’s just my opinion.
I have a champion tri-fuel that cost < $1k which runs essentially my whole house. It's plumbed into my natural gas so as long as that is up (it has never gone out), I don't even have to refill it.
I read somewhere that it's a big deal if a natural gas network runs out of gas because then air can get into the system. That can lead to explosions, so they have to systematically purge the entire network.
We have the same. $2K generator, while house transfer switch, natural gas hookup. Guess we'll never have a power failure again, since we just got a new generator.
> An $80K-100K car
See, your problem is assuming that the EV is 80-100K. Or that the ICE car is 30K. This is a contrived comparison. An average new car is well over 30K. And I bought a brand new Lightning for 50K. Being able to use 131kWh of battery for things other than driving is a pleasant bonus, and I prefer it to having a gas generator I have to keep maintained and store fuel for.
Yes. Many electric cars and trucks have this feature.
You an drive almost every EV that has that feature too.
Or rather, you can take half of the difference in price and install some proper PV + battery system in your house that can be used when there's isn't a catastrophe too.
No, but because they can't be driven, your house stays powered when someone goes for a drive.
you're inventing the alternator from first principles
> But can they also be driven?
Sounds like you're desperately searching for a problem where a specific make and model of a car can fit as a solution. That doesn't make the car any better than it is.
No, that's what my car is for. You can't drive your cybertruck when it's running your refrigerator. Wrong tool for the job.
It is an emergency. I'll compromise in an emergency. My fridge can sit unpowered for a couple hours while I'm driving, and that is all I need to drive anyway.
If there is a major outage most bosses understand that you won't be working normally because you need to deal with the emergency.
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The amount of money you spent on a cybertruck could’ve instead been spent on a generator, gasoline for the generator, and a car to go buy gasoline for the generator. Or, battery packs & solar panels, and a generator, and gasoline for the generator, and a car to go buy gasoline for the generator. That car could even be an EV, just a much more efficient one.
I don't think anyone buys a cybertruck for this ability. But if you have one this is a nice bonus and the additions too use it this was are less than a generator
The power being delivered on wheels that go with you is the whole point. A permanently affixed generator doesn't help get power out into the middle of the field when I need to do things like weld farm equipment. There are plenty of solutions out there, but the power source and truck carrying the tools being one and the same would be quite attractive if the aforementioned problems were solved.
> the middle of the field when I need to do things like weld farm equipment
There is an entire genre of welding equipment designed for this scenario.
https://bakersgas.com/collections/miller-engine-driven-weldi...
Exactly why the power source being the truck I already own anyway is far more appealing, at least it would be if the aforementioned problems were solved. Special tools come with special costs that don't really make sense most of the time.
What if they also made the cybertruck capable of refrigeration.
They're not going to be making any sort of cybertruck anymore.
This is obviously not the primary reason to get a Telsa. But a full home generator will run you $15k to buy and install where i live, and a whole bunch of hassle to install with permits. I don't have one because my power doesn't go out that much. But if i'm otherwise on the fence about a vehicle, I would absolutely want this as a feature.
Maybe a generator sized to run a regular home in perpetuity, but I bet it's much, much less than that to have an electrician install a GenerLink and to buy a regular portable generator just powerful enough to run your fridge and freezer.
In our area, when a storm hit, the roads washed out, so the generators ran out of propane. Then the local propane companies ran out of delivery truck capacity because of the demand surge. Finally, the regional distributors ran out of propane.
Our solar panels kept the fridge running, but we were heating the house with a wood stove (it was very cloudy, so we were getting maybe an hour of sun a day). If we had bidirectional house charging, we could have had warm showers + used the heat pump: We would have been able to fast-charge the car at 100-200kw in town. The house can limp through 20-30 hours on ~ 25kwh, so the charger would charge the house at a few days per hour, including losses from driving to and from town + round tripping through the battery, and also running the house heat pump.
None of the other people around here stayed online. Some propane-dependent people had no electricity for > 2 weeks (with rationing, they managed to keep their generators online for about a week, and PG&E took three weeks to fix their lines).
This was in the outskirts of Silicon Valley, so better-than-puerto-rico infrastructure, but only just.
This is a total failure/incompetence of multiple utility institutions that we all pay for and depend on. An electric company that does not have the capacity to respond quickly to natural disasters and propane delivery infrastructure that doesn't have the reserves to weather such an event. Even a day without electricity should be unacceptable in a modern, functional society. How do we tolerate 2 weeks? I bet the CEOs of these companies are not going without electricity for 2 weeks.
We are far away from, but slowly approaching, Mad Max levels of institutional failure, and everyone seems to treat it as normal and unavoidable.
> This is a total failure/incompetence of multiple utility institutions that we all pay for and depend on. Even a day without electricity should be unacceptable in a modern, functional society.
Like the storm surge walls at Fukushima, all infrastructure is designed with a certain size of storm or event in mind based on historical averages and outliers.
Climate change is throwing all that to shit.
Your comment says plain and clear you’ve never lived through a “once in 100 years” level event more than once in a decade, and you don’t realize how much it would cost to upgrade what we’ve spent ~100 years building.
It’s trillions, just to get started.
I also wonder if you’d be fine with increasing taxes to pay for all that, or if you already complain about “high taxes”
You forgot "higher maintenance" that goes along with seldom-used things that run on gas. That gas doesn't drain itself, and if you don't do that, well, Amazon has carbs for Honda generators for $30. For something I might use once a year. No, thanks.