Nissan Says Emergency Power For Your Home Could Come From Your Car

I read this post over at the excellent blog called Zero Energy Construction, and I thought it was a very interesting idea. It seems that the Nissan corporation is investigating ways to reverse the flow of electricity on its electric car (the Nissan Leaf) and allow the auto to power your home during a temporary blackout. Here's the post:


Everyone's looking for an edge in the electric vehicle wars, and Nissan might have one. It's working on a system that would allow Leaf owners to use the car to supply electricity to their houses during power outages.
Lots of people buy generators for that purpose, but Hideaki Watanabe, head of Nissan's Global Zero Emissions Business unit, says his EV could handle the job.
The Leaf's battery can store 24 kilowatt hours of electricity, equal to about a day's worth of energy use in a normal U.S. household.
"In case of blackouts we can utilize that," Watanabe said. "In Japan, some people say instead of installing a generator they'll just buy a Leaf. As of today we don't have a function to discharge, but we are looking into that."
Watanabe is pushing his engineers to look for ways to reverse the flow of energy.
"I want it ASAP--at least I would like to see some concrete proposal by the end of the year," he said. "I want a prototype."
Watanabe said Nissan could use the CHAdeMO DC fast-charging system backed by most Japan automakers because the technology can detect electricity leaks.