Get an EV instead. Use it for bi-directional charging, buy PV to reduce your dependency and energy bill and a heat pump to be independent of oil/gas companies.
That's an awful lot of money that you're proposing people spend in order to cover a rare occurrence. Of course there's day-to-day value in having all of that which a backup generator cannot provide, but in a power outage, you'd probably rather just have the cheap gas generator, and maybe a $1000-ish "solar generator" (i.e. battery pack with inverter) that you can use to load-shift the generator. Run the genny during the day to charge the battery; run the fridge, lights, and phone charger from the battery overnight.
There is no additional infrastructure for plugging a vehicle like Hyundai that supports V2L into a generator socket. Except a 20$ adaptor. You only get 15A from it but that’s enough to run key functions for 5 days silently and exhaust free.
You can run your fridge and freezer, you can run your (gas) furnace, and your lights. That’s most people’s core requirements, and a typical car battery can do this for 5 days. I’ve also heard of people watching tv on it.
Yep, ran my refrigerator, my router and my modem with an inverter on my Chevrolet Bolt EV after blackouts from a large windstorm in California knocked power out for a few days.
The trick with Bolt EVs is that one must have the car on, because the high voltage battery will not engage when the car is off for safety reasons. Also, the car shuts off every hour of unless the seatbelt is fastened. This is not a big deal.
Since the comparison was between a generator, I left out the generator inlet you need. But that’s like <1k$ install. The car replaces the generator but the inlet is needed to breaker box either way.
Be choosy about the EV, not all of them have this feature (Tesla, for instance, doesn’t last I checked). That said, after we got our Hyundai (and the vehicle-to-load adapter), I sold our generator to a neighbor. Less than a year later, we both got to test our electrical backups.
Hopefully you were going to buy an EV anyway, because a nice generator is about $1000. A Hyundai Ioniq 5 is considerably more than that.
We had a nearly week long power outage due to a windstorm. Tesla has a power gateway, only usable by Cybertruck for now. that detects grid failures and automatically fails over the entire house to vehicle power. My Cybertruck (123 kWh) kept my house powered (15 kWh/day - natural gas took care of hot water, heating, and cooking) for almost all of that, with a one-time top-up at a friend's house.
That's a terrible suggestion. A car is 20x the price of a generator while and at least 10x larger. A car can't power an entire household for days on end using a few gallons of gasoline per day, etc. A car is a transportation device, not a stationary energy generation machine designed as a backup in case of power failure.
> A car can't power an entire household for days on end
This is underestimating the ludicrous amount of power an EV's batteries have. You can absolutely power your house for days on end using one. (Of course, that should also give us pause to think about what it means that we spend so much energy for transportation compared to household necessities.) And gasoline has plenty of problems too, like its extremely short shelf-life.
I have two Tesla Powerwalls in my garage, and they (among other things) do just this.
I look at the size of those, and the size of a random Tesla, and I can easily see two of these shoved into the baseboard of a Tesla, much less the larger vehicles.
I know the Ford Lightning was advertised as a potential back up power source for the home.
The real trick is getting the power out of the battery and in to the home itself. It's one thing to run an extension cord to the refrigerator, quite another to get the battery plugged into your home circuitry. That requires more preparation, as well as an electrician.
Cheap way to power the home directly is to get a generator inlet put in ($500-1000) and connect the vehicle to that. You can then use either a vehicle or a gas generator, which is useful during extended outages when you need to top up the car.
Expensive way is to get some manufacturer specific automatic transfer switch (I got Tesla's put in). The hardware is $2500 and the labor is $4K+.
I did both and used both during a recent week long outage.
4 bedroom house in Austin, TX. A hot summer is around 100 kWh and my Rivian battery is 135 kWh. Which means I can roughly get a one full summer day out of my car's battery (assuming I still need to drive the car and usually leave it at 70% max).
So there you have it, I get about one full day. Not "days on end".
On the other hand here in Washington a little west of Seattle with a 3 bedroom all electric house I use about 40 kWh a day in the coldest month of winter and 8-10 kWh a day in summer.
You could get something like a Span electrical panel and only enable critical loads during a blackout and set the AC a little higher than normal. Even a large house can go down to 20-30 kWh a day.
That's on the higher end of household usage. On the lower end, during a cold windstorm in the PNW I was able to get it down to 600W (15 kWh/day) because I have mostly natural gas appliances. My Cybertruck kept us going for nearly a week with just one top-up (because I don't like to go above 80% or below 20%). We deferred using the dryer and dishwasher, and relied on the fireplace for warmth instead of the HVAC.
On a hot day yeah I'd be running the A/C but ideally you'd have solar to offset much of that.
> A car can't power an entire household for days on end using a few gallons of gasoline per day, etc
Average home uses 30kwH / day. Average EV battery size 40kwh. Correct not days on end, but at least a full day to full capacity, and perhaps a few days at reduced capacity. My Ioniq 5 has an 84kwH battery so I guess I'd get a bit further.
Remember that having PV isn't enough, you also need to have the circuitry to disconnect your house from the grid, because your personal panels probably don't have the capacity to power the entire grid on their own (plus it wouldn't be safe for line workers to have random pockets of energy in a grid that's supposed to be down).
vs
EV => $8000 - $40000
Bidirectional charging infra => $2000 - $5000
PV => $5000 - $15000
Heat pump => $5000 - $10000
That's an awful lot of money that you're proposing people spend in order to cover a rare occurrence. Of course there's day-to-day value in having all of that which a backup generator cannot provide, but in a power outage, you'd probably rather just have the cheap gas generator, and maybe a $1000-ish "solar generator" (i.e. battery pack with inverter) that you can use to load-shift the generator. Run the genny during the day to charge the battery; run the fridge, lights, and phone charger from the battery overnight.