Tesla just brought this functionality to new Model 3 and Model Y cars as of Oct 1. It requires at least one Powerwall 3 to enable bidirectional V2H - what they call Powershare. But those cars can now power the home and charge from solar while the grid is offline.
Yes. Typically V2G works by connecting an external inverter to the high-voltage bus.
It just needs to start a charging session, and then siphon energy _off_ instead of supplying it. People tried that before, but the firmware on Model 3/Y monitors the flow and terminates the session if the flow is negative.
> By default, all Cybertruck trims ever produced and all Model 3 and Model Y vehicles ordered in the U.S. and Puerto Rico after October 1, 2026 are capable of Powershare. Some, but not all, Model 3 and Model Y vehicles produced before October 1, 2026 are also capable of Powershare. [0]
I presume it is a hardware revision, like how Tesla removed radar.
Batteries alone are not suitable for long duration outages, but solar+batteries, designed correctly, can not only supply enough power during long outages, it can get you to be off-grid entirely in the first place at a dramatically more cost effective number than your $500k quoted - perhaps 1/5 or less for a system suitable for your needs of 115kWh per day. So while the system might be more expensive than a generator alone, it can still beat on value because it provides power all year round.
You also do an unfair comparison here - you are OK with portable batteries providing only fridge & WiFi for a couple hours, but expect whole-hole batteries to last a week. Many people use whole-home batteries to bridge typical outages that last <24 hours, and do so without ever having to notice any change of use of their home - powering their full heating/cooling etc.
Batteries and generators are also not mutually exclusive. You can install a solar+battery system because it makes economic sense and pays for itself while providing zero-downtime backup for most outages, while also backing that up with a generator for longer term edge case outages eg long extended outages during the winter or where there is an unusually long “solar drought” - it really depends on how much resilience you are designing for.
We have frequent power cuts and follow this same philosophy.
Our first line of defence is the solar system's battery. When power goes out, that will keep things running for some time with the big optional loads switched off - e.g. hot tub, hot water cylinder and pool.
If the sun's shining we can run like this for a long time.
In a solar drought, when the solar battery runs low, the next step is to plug the EV in via V2L and use it as a generator to charge the solar battery. EVs have comparatively huge batteries, so at the cost of losing mobility, which may be important in an emergency, this will keep things going for even longer.
One great feature of using an EV is you can drive to a fast charger, charge up in an hour, and transport all that energy back home.
The final fallback is to plug the 2KW petrol generator in to charge the solar battery. This is enough to keep things going forever assuming a petrol supply. A petrol generator is nicely portable and can be loaned to less prepared neighbours who likely have their own petrol.
The key to it all is the solar battery. That gives you uninterrupted power while mucking around with the alternate sources. It doesn't even have to be all that large if you have an EV.
In the scenario mentioned in the GP post where a giant tropical storm hit resetting the grid for 7+ days, how big is the chance that your solar panels installation has survived? Also, if the grid is gone, won’t the fast chargers also be out of service?
Don’t get me wrong, I think you’re right for most cases but I also think for some more end of the world type of scenarios there is little that beats a generator and stored fuel.
If you can stay there (no evacuation for building doesn't seal enough to make it habitable), most of the solar should have survived. Moving a broken panel out of the way and swapping one from the end of the array in to make the cables fit, or even having a spare jumper cable to swap in place of a broken panel, is quite easy to do. Mostly just make sure there's no load current at all on the string when you disconnect the MC4 connector with the special tool that keeps uneducated people from unplugging them under load and getting greeted with a persistent low current (not "arc flash", we're in the region of "high powered welder used with just normal welding PPE") DC arc (that may supply several hundred volts for a long drawn out burn). As long as it's around substantially below 500 mA you're not gonna sustain an arc.
Indeed, that's why I mentioned petrol generator as the last level of backup.
Though the most recent big tropical storm we had a few years ago, the power was out for 3 days, it was dark and cloudy obviously so no solar, the local petrol pumps had no power and the roads were blocked with fallen trees so we couldn't even drive anywhere. In that situation it really is candles and cooking on wood fires once the petrol runs dry.
The comparison is unfair for many reasons, actually. A real install would have solar inputs charging the batteries and offsetting loads during the day.
It also wouldn’t run a 5-ton HVAC system 24/7 for 7 straight days, which is how the post got to the extremely high number.
I managed to go a week off the grid a couple years ago after a cyclone on a 27k~ AUD system that includes a septic system, home servers, starlink and the rest.
The servers obviously had to come down a few nights, but never had to bring down the fridge or anything critical. Didn't even have proper 4/5g service for a few days.
Main issue was the hot water tank which could have in theory been hooked up to my gas via an instant hot water heater for such occasions.
It's nice to do this for more than just the direct economic costs. The generator doesn't have to run 24/7 since the batteries absorb the excess power produced by the generator. This means less fuel wasted as well as less noise produced. I used to have two small generators that I could run (and team, if needed) but adding a battery component meant being able to sleep at night without a combustion engine burning fuel all night long.
Yup, even better if you power a separate battery charger with the generator, but let loads be handled by the battery+inverter. You don’t need to provision the generator for peak loads (which can be quite high), or even worry about high harmonic distortion from a cheap generator screwing with your electronics. It basically turns your system into a fully ‘online’ UPS.
Also, really handy for diesel gens which will ‘wet stack’ if you only run them for short periods or with light loads.
Provision a generator size which you expect to run say 6-10 hours at a time (at say 70-80% rated load) to fully charge your batteries, and a battery bank sized for 3-4 days of load.
Keeps your total gen hours much lower, much more efficient fuel wise (you can set the ideal load using your charger, and it will keep it that way regardless of increasing/decreasing loads), doesn’t require as big a generator if you have things like AC compressors, heat pumps, etc. with high start loads, and gives you a lot of redundancy and flexibility. It even gives you time to fix your gen or find/beg/borrow another if yours breaks, and you won’t need to keep the gen running overnight if you plan appropriately, so your neighbors will like you more.
Best of all worlds. Especially if you have natural gas, or get a tri-fuel generator and keep propane handy. Propane doesn’t go bad like gas or diesel can.
If you have free night charging plan you can recoup quite faster. My system paid off for itself in 3 years - although I designed and set it up myself, so it was about 3x cheaper than through contractors (and yes I'm in US and I pulled permits to do this).
Highly dependent on where you are, what your electricity costs, and what your backfeeding compensation scheme is (eg net metering). In California solar alone is no longer economically viable with NEM 3.0 but solar+batteries to maximize self consumption is still in that sticky ~7 year layback range - and those calculations tend to assume today’s power prices, that are in reality going up quite quickly.
I think for most people it would be if they can they afford a 20 year advance on electricity costs all at once. That is a lot of money if you have more pressing needs, but if you got that money sitting around then yea of course it is a good investment.
If you are fluent in a second language, you understand that the only way to become truly fluent is not just to learn the tangible aspects - the vocabulary, grammar, references, expressions, etc - you have to learn to think like the language/culture.
It’s a combination of cultural assumptions, facial expressions and affectations, thinking patterns, and a whole cultural upbringing that can lead you to very different mental processes and natural conclusions starting from the same words and phrases.
Language absolutely encodes a certain form of intelligence. A lot of those things are reflected not just in the totality of the culture but the language itself. Being fluent leads you to different thinking patterns and different conclusions when processing in that language.
Absolutely? I don't think it does so much. People speaking different languages seem to have very similar thoughts. It's true that fluency is a wholistic performance, but I don't think there are any particular thoughts that can't be translated.
It is tougher with european languages from the influence of latin and the sort of mutt that is english. They are all pretty related. That being said when I learned spanish I felt the way they put adjectives after the noun in spanish leads to a sort of different thinking pattern. Car red instead of red car. A bunch of more distant languages though there's no European language equivalent for certain words or concepts. I'm not sure about the sentance structures, but if its a lot different than european languages, I wouldn't be surprised if this changes thinking. I've heard in some languages they don't have a concept of "self" or "I".
Ask your favorite AI to give you a crash course, but to start the main models you need to know are the GFS and the ECMWF. In the US where available in high res, the HRRR is excellent, but doesn’t forecast very far out. The PWG/PWE 1km PredictWind models are also very good at picking up land based features and other more precise patterns. If you are in the US everything else is probably not super relevant.
Any advice will really depend on where you live and the dominant source of local error. These are all good options for the US and if the one main source of error is near surface winds around complex terrain then you can also look into WindNinja from the National Forrest Service.
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