It’s niche just because natural disasters are thankfully relatively rare, but I still think having good contingencies is worth it.

Fuck being seen in a cybertruck though.

Electric vehicles won't, ever, be prioritized over bringing up residential, commercial and emergency services. The fact that even on a super charger it's 20+ minutes to charge a Cybertruck means the two or three at the local gas station will just end up with 12+ hour lines. Even now generators are fueled before private vehicles.

Bringing up power after disasters is super dangerous as is. A lot of systems that hadn't been turned off in years do a cold start, and sparks fly. It's why the power company and fire departments coordinate very very closely on grid work.

You know someone's going to try and bypass any safeties and circuit breakers and end up taking down their house when they try to restore power after a flood or something. People already regularly die from running their generator in the garage and most of these aren't wired directly into house mains.

> Most of the disasters I'm aware of people either get their power back in a short enough amount of time that they can use a normal generator for the gap

TBF an EV car has an absolutely massive battery relative to the electric consumption of a house, unless you're using resistive heating all around. Especially if you ration use.

https://youtu.be/yO5fJ8z66Z8

My Ioniq 5 has been a godsend. No, it can't power the house without dorking around with my electrical panel. But we can run the fridge, dishwasher, a few standing lights and keep phones and computers full charged.

I used a similar setup to Alex's but with the outlet in the rear seat instead of the V2X connector. I will probably by the V2X connector since it supposedly hanldles higher power draw.

Also, since when are electric water heaters common in the USA? Every home I’ve ever lived in here has used gas for heating water.

But if it's hooked up to hot water, add in the 4 gallons of water it used and the 1.5 kWh to heat that.

The difference is mostly to use as little water as possible - just enough to wet the surface of the dishes not to soak them, and heat only the wash water not the 2 sets of rinse water or the prewash water.

There are some neat tricks to do this - for example there is no water level sensor - you aren't aiming to fill the bottom of the machine - instead you run the pump at full speed and keep adding water slowly till the pump electrically feels like it doesn't have many air bubbles in it.

You're probably right about that. A lot of people grew up without dishwashers and don't have a way to economically install one outside of a major kitchen remodel even if they have the space which many in cities don't have. They're also not the, for lack of a better term, necessities that washers, stoves, and ovens are. And, of course, dishwashers don't eliminate the need for any handwashing and if you aren't cooking or doing a lot of entertaining a lot, they may not be all that useful. I do cook but still probably only run my dishwasher 2 or 3 times per week.

I have a rule that every single item in the kitchen goes into the dishwasher. If it doesn’t survive oh well - survival of the fittest.

The only thing exception outside of size that I can think of are the fancy knives. But we have an everyday set I don’t mind dulling and just sharpening once a month with a basic sharpener.

Everything used immediately goes into the dishwasher during the day, then before bed it gets ran full or not. Dishes put away with morning coffee and the cycle repeats. No dirty dishes cluttering up the kitchen, and no wasteful (water and time) hand washing required.

Source: I did that dishwashing job in school, to pay for my lunches.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good dishwasher. But we need to recognize the difference in the jobs here.

And bad dishwashers? Well, let me just say that we will never, ever have another Bosch dishwasher in our house.

Anyway I agree that in emergency conditions it can go a looong way for a house.

It's 30kW for one hour.

(Or 1.25kW for 24 hours, or however you prefer).

[Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilowatt-hour]

30kW is a rate.

30kWh is a measure of energy, about 100MJ.

30kWh/day is a rate again, 100MJ/day.

It seems clunky, but it's a way energy usage in a house is typically measured.

I said the time period matters when you're talking about it relative to generation. 30kWh over the course of a day is very different to 30kWh over ten minutes.

Except that GP (pmontra) had asked "Is that 30 kW each hour of the day?"

Clearly someone asking that doesn't understand what kWh/day means, and since you were backing GP, it seemed reasonable to guess that you might not understand either.

If you want a "better than nothing" but imperfect analogy, Wh is how much water you have in a bottle, and W is how quickly you can get the water out.

This discussion seems super silly, considering he's just using the measurement that the industry adopted decades ago...

Are y'all just coming out of a time travel device from the 70s or something?

I'll put aside the two-bit attitude and that you don't know that power (W) and energy (Wh) were measured in the exact same way in the "70s or something" (just ask your grandparents).

> the world decided to use kWh as the thing to measure

> kw per day, kw per week, kw per month, kw per year.

You switched between units from one sentence to the next? The indeed world measures kWh per day, not kW per day. There is no such thing as "kw per day". The wrong usage is common because a lot of people don't understand the concepts and just parrot a common mistake. When they say "kW per day" what they should actually say is "kWh per day". It's where the unintuitive part comes in, they omit the "hour" or assume it's kW/h, like km/h, instead of kW times h.

> This discussion seems super silly, considering he's just using the measurement that the industry adopted decades ago...

The industry adopted the correct measurement units decades before your grandparents were born. You just have a hard time understanding because it's easier to do cheap snark.

Unlike those people from the 70s or something, you live in a world with all the information you could want at your fingertips, you even have machines (AI) that digest it for you, and you even had me bothering to give an explanation a kid could process. To be unapologetically ignorant today is the same as being intellectually incompetent.

30kWh is 1.25kW for 24 hours or 30kW for one hour.

30kW every hour means 720kWh per day. 30kW all day is also 720kWh per day.

The comment is nonsense.

The only way you can steel man it is by saying he isn't concerned about the 1.25kW, he is concerned by the swings, but the said 30kW twice for two different time spans so that can't be it either.

That’s why whole-home generators are typically sized at 24kW, unless there are some circuits you’re not going to power while you are operating on generator.

Now, most homes don’t use that much power 24x7. Most homes use a lot less than that. But, they need to provide that much power, in case all the electric devices inside the house are all running at the same time. And in Texas, newer homes usually come with 200 amp service, because HVAC draws so much, plus electric hot water, electric cooktops, etc….

So, to get a real idea of the amount of power you need from batteries, you need to look at how much power your house actually requires on those critical circuits, on the worst day. If you can’t deliver that much peak power, then you need to increase the size of your inverter stack, or you need to reduce the number of critical circuits you’re powering. Most battery solutions for powering a house will give you some options here, and then combine all the output power from each stack into a smart breaker box.

Then you also need to look at how much total power you pull over a full day. That’s your minimum kWh rating that you need from the battery pack. And again, most whole-home type battery solutions will give you multiple options here. These are companies like Bluetti, Anker, EcoFlow, etc….

For example, the Anker SOLIX E10 Power Dock can do a max of 7.6kW sustained and 10kW turbo output with 12kWh-90kWh storage, depending on how many battery units you connect to that inverter. But to get 20kW total turbo output, you’d need two inverter stacks, each with their own chain of batteries. And you would need their Smart Power Dock to combine those two stacks. Each power dock can handle a total of three input stacks, for a total maximum of 22.8kW combined max sustained output, with 30kW combined turbo output. That gets you their 200-amp equivalent service.

In comparison a Tesla Powerwall does about 11.5kW maximum output for one unit, but has much less battery capacity per unit (only 13.5kWh). And you would either need to trim down your critical loads to get under that 11.5kW maximum output, or have a pair of such units that each talk to their gateway device. And the Tesla Powerwall doesn’t have any additional battery units that I know of that you can connect to that same inverter. So, you would end up buying a lot more inverters if you want longer runtimes with Tesla.

Either way, you can pair these with solar panels on your roof, to get either total or partial fill of these units from the sun, and the rest from the grid. The same is true for all of the major whole-house battery backup units I know of.

Now, if the batteries in your car can sustain 100kWh of power, and you’re using 30kWh per day, that would last you just over three days before you’re completely drained. Then you would have to look at the maximum amount of instantaneous power that the vehicle can provide. Is that just 10kW? Can it do 20kW? 30kW? Note that this number is usually a lot lower than the rate that the vehicle can charge at, when it is at a supercharger facility. Usually, they can suck down the power a lot faster than they can push it up. And many BEVs today are still pretty slow at being charged up.

I look forward to the day when all BEVs can charge quickly at high voltage, and also discharge V2L and V2H at high rates of speed, with large battery capacities. But I think it’s going to be a while before we get there.

Meanwhile, I feel like I need to have the power service at my house upgraded to 200 amp, before I can realistically buy a BEV. We just don’t have the spare power capacity available to us to be able to charge the vehicle at reasonable speeds, which would require a level 2 charger at home.

The value of the same, repurposed to a "powerwall" - $10k per 10 KWh

The value of it once attached to a "movable powerwall" - :) add a few more zeros

Clearly, I am in the wrong business...

When we got solar we asked for quotes, but ‘No Tesla’. The sales rep said ‘We get that a lot’.

I wasn’t interested in hearing any advantages of a Tesla Powerwall, that brand is toxic to me now.

There’s plenty of good alternatives that don’t fund criminals like Tommy Robinson and Russell Brand.

We have Sigenergy. Are they better than Teslas? Unsure, but at least I have no idea what the owner(s) think.

I want a system that doesn't need to be connected to the cloud.

It was also really hard to work with them to even get the bid.

It was quite the premium.

If you have a string inverter setup, I’m not aware of anything good that is cheaper. If you have micro inverters then sure, but otherwise you have additional hardware cost.

Best practice would be to build a separate structure and physically separate the battery from your house.

And you got a budget opensorce powerwall

But it is still cheaper to stockpile some generators and gas than stockpile a cybertruck. If there's an EV charging station up within a 1 hr drive, gas stations are also going to be up.

Not really. Some areas in California have multiple PSPS outages during fire season. Many people have gotten gas generators or powerwalls to deal with it, but using your EV would be ideal.

Generators have solved this problem. My family used to lose electricity anytime there was a semi serious snow storm. We got a gasoline generator after the second time and it was always sufficient. We never needed to siphon gas from the car either. We later transitioned to a natural gas generator. The lines are all underground and tie into the existing system for the stove and dryer. No car involved.

If you are concerned about that, you get solar panels and a battery. You still do not have to worry about losing your means of transportation.

  > This seems like an awfully niche case, no? 

A Cybertruck has nearly 10x the battery capacity of a single Powerwall, and to buy that much Powerwall capacity would cost at least as much as a Cybertruck. Even a Tesla Model 3 (which now supports home backup) is over 5x Powerwalls.

You still have to pay to install home backup support on your home’s breaker (at least $10k), but you don’t need anywhere near the amount of very expensive supplemental home batteries.

Also, even an EV with a 120V outlet and no home backup support could be very useful for recharging a portable battery bank.

Regardless, the thing that’s really great for cost effectiveness is that the same large battery can be used everyday for driving and also used rarely for emergency home backup systems.

10% to pay for their costs - materials and labour

90% to pay for their new Cybertruck financing

$10,000 to install a socket, a breaker, and a transfer switch?

Surely not.

Electricians like their transfer switches because they are right sized and everything, but the interlock approach actually gives you more control because every breaker is allowed (a transfer switch will only expose some small subset of all your breakers usually), you just have to manage the power supply yourself.

No. It's like a generator except way more power and mobile. Rechargable via solar. So basically just a much better generator.

So there's that to consider. Or don't.

Doesn't make sense for what they are charging for it. But still!

It has other downsides, obviously. But the notion of "emergency power for your house" is kinda moot.

My experience with power outages (after big summer storms, not a hurricane thank goodness) has been that my neighborhood is impacted, but that places nearby have power. They tend to restore commercial first, so the supercharger near me is up and running before my house.

And that's assuming they are sunny days.

It takes about a day to charge my Leaf on a small solar install.

But yes, it needs to be sunny.

And yet nothing prevents you from driving daily.

I'm 100% off grid on solar in the middle of nowhere. My panels could burn up, get hit by hail, get searched by law enforcement, flooded out, eaten by mice, stolen by miscreants, abducted by aliens or buried in snow. And of course in the event of a volcano they are probably not gonna function well.

So they are of course totally unworkable in events when the power grid is down.

But I like using them and they've been reliable so far...

There are practical issues with it, but it's possible. The question is EROI or Energy Return on Investment. Do you get more energy from it than it took to make it, which unfortunately is not there yet. Shrinking it down to fit into your backyard is an exercise left for the reader.

And are regularly rotating that stockpile, because gasoline has a shelf life measured in months

Somewhat simplified: As long as the feedback loop demands an injector duty cycle that is within predetermined limits, it can compensate for and run reasonably well on gas that burns relatively poorly (for whatever reason it does) by simply sending more fuel into the holes.

Conditions that produce pinging are further sought to be thwarted by using a knock sensor for additional feedback.

A Corolla has a lot of stuff going for it that can help deal with fuel variations and issues in ways that a majority of small engines are completely incapable of.

It tends to resolve to: Climb in, turn key, engine starts easily, and car drives fine -- just like it has done thousands of times before.

I drained the old fuel out and replaced with fresh, and it fired up on the first subsequent half-assed pull of the starter rope.

(Which reminds me: It's been six months again already. Time to see if it still works.)

You have to put in in the tank and run it for a bit to make sure that the carbs don't have untreated fuel inside.

Simpler gas equipment like mowers and generators don't have enough compression to really care about anything but ancient gas, and if you run any vehicle that is multi-fuel capable it can detect and adjust compression based on a fuel's capabilities.

Ive been repairing and fixing junkers of cars, mowers, ATVs, generators, and more for 30 years and not once has bad gas stopped something from running. I only remove it if it was clearly having water raining into the tank. In every other case where I couldn't start something after sitting around for 5+ years, it was from the gas gumming up in the carb or the shitty diaphragm pump, which generally means there is little to no gas left to start with.

I wouldn't even suspect gas of ever being bad unless it was atleast a few years old. If the tank was open it could have evaporated, if the tank was closed it probably ain't great gas but I bet it would still run in anything but a high compression application.

Spark, not compression.

The term was always called spark adjustment, never compression. Compression is the thing you work about when milling the heads or exchanging oscillating components (rods, pistons) due to changing the physical geometry of the combustion chamber.

So yes, adjusting the spark timing does technically adjust how compressed the air/fuel mixture is at the moment of ignition. But the term used to describe it has always been "adjusting spark" or "adjusting spark timing" or "adjusting timing". Nobody ever refers to that as "adjusting compression" because the term compression is used to refer to something else.

In places where long power outages are common (hurricane areas), many gas stations have their own generators (they also have a convenient source of fuel to run them!)

"The generator was called the Electric Power Pak. From 1969 to 1972, Ford offered a 2,500-watt underhood generator, mostly on the Contractor’s Special, though it could be special ordered on other trucks. It also wasn’t driven off the engine’s belt. It was a separate Onan generator with its own 5.5 hp air-cooled single-cylinder engine, feeding an outlet in the bed. It sat on the driver’s side splash pan. The package the commenter calls a “Rancher” is likely the Farm & Ranch Special, which is one of the trucks that came with it.

The chainsaw was real. Ford sold Ford-blue chainsaws from 1970 to about 1976. They were rebadged Ohlsson & Rice saws: the Eagle I/II and the smaller Hawk. A mount was also sold that held the saw on the F-250’s driver’s side inner fender"

https://www.fordification.com/tech/images/onan_brochure-phot... https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5601f99be4b059... https://www.fordification.com/tech/onan.htm

When I was shopping in 2025, this was the only truck with that kind of output.

You would need to add an accessory generator (which probably won't for under the hood) and possibly upgrade the cooling system.

As an electrical generator, it's really not very good. The alternator is rated at 120 Amps (bigger than many, smaller than others).

At 13.8v, that's only 1,656 Watts -- on a good day, with the engine wound up. But the engine won't be wound up. It will instead be idling. The output will be less than 1656 Watts.

It burns right around 0.6 gallons of gasoline per hour (ie 22kW!) while idling and doing ~nothing else. It holds 21 gallons of gas.

So the unachievable best-case of idling-and-doing-no-real-work means that if it starts with a full tank of fuel, it will run out in 35 hours.

And in the real world, it will be doing work since that's the whole point of the exercise. It will therefore use somewhat more than its do-nothing 0.6 gallons per hour idle consumption.

We can ignore the longevity issues of treating a gas-fired vehicle as a stationary generator (these are expensive parts getting abnormally heat-soaked) because this is a temporary solution to a temporary problem, but as a practical matter: I'll still need to fill it up with gas, however I do that, about every day.

And, sure: That can be a way to solve some problems. With a decent inverter stashed out of the weather, connected with appropriately-big cables, I can probably use it to run the gas-fired furnace, the fridge and freezer, some lights, and some digital entertainment. Maybe it can't run all of that at the same time, but I'm smart and I'll manage.

The gas-fired car probably is useful, as long as I can drive somewhere and fill it back up[1].

---

Or: I could just plug stuff into an appropriate EV. It can sit there quietly being the giant battery that it is, and I can drive it out every couple/three days, or maybe just once per week as some suggest, to fill it back up.

It won't have an idle baseload of anywhere near the equivalent of 0.6 gallons of gasoline and it will therefore respond well to intermittent, dynamic loads like heat and refrigeration.

The EV is probably more-useful, as long as I can drive somewhere and charge it back up.

---

[1]: Sure, sure. I can carry a large quantity of gasoline to make the trips more-worthwhile. I can even store some locally (it's a pain to keep it fresh, but do-able).

If I were into that kind of prepping then what would be my practical limit? An extra 40 gallons, for ~60 overall? Great! Now I can run the car/house combo for 3 days before heading back out, and the EV still probably wins on this metric.

That'd be a great option to explore!

Regular cars are very inefficient at the job. Mine maths out to somewhere around 7% efficiency from fuel-to-electrical-power, as a best case (and without yet involving the necessary inverter).

But for generating electrical power, PHEVs have very different tricks than a typical-and-pedestrian sleepy belt-driven alternator has.

Any pointers on a candidate model, or range of models, that include this function as a built-in intent?

---

I was tempted to get into the maths of using a regular gas-fired car intermittently to charge batteries. Maybe with something like an Anker Solix that has enough surge capacity to start a normal-ish furnace blower or fridge compressor, and can accept ~800W of power from a running car's 12v system for charging and/or output.

The temptation persists to write further about that kind of concept at some point, but the previous comment was getting long-enough that people tend to tune out anyway.

---

Except, as an aside: After the 2012 derecho where my neighborhood was without power for a couple of weeks, a neighbor down the block from me parked a minty-looking John Deere tractor in his driveway. This was connected, via PTO, to a rather beefy generator.

That combination (a tractor with a PTO is meant to do stationary-engine duty while doing significant work) sure did look expensive to keep going.

But it was still humming along every time I went past, so it must have been working for him.

(And during that outage, the big corpo gas station just a few blocks further out grew a genset the size of a shipping container that powered their operation. After they got that going, which took a couple of days from the start of the blackout, they were running very normally. IIRC it took them more days to get it disconnected and shut down than to get it delivered and set up, but it worked, and we all had fuel nearby.)

But for the other 99.99% of humanity, there are certainly more cost-effective ways. A portable power station and solar panels are probably the better move unless you have some really massive power needs.

(Admittedly, a nuclear winter reduces the effectiveness of those solar panels somewhat)

Are you telling us that you are not planning to buy Tesla Roadster? But what about the situation when there will be huge snow storm and humongous tree will fall across the road, and you will be like really hungry and you could just to fly over it and not starve to death?

If you can choose between a truck that can’t power your house and a truck that can, prepper mentality is to choose the one that can.

You can stockpile diesel for a generator. That's what actual prepping looks like.

Take it from a Ukrainian.

Much easier to just buy some solar panels to recharge the electric truck.

>Much easier to just buy some solar panels to recharge the electric truck.

Much easier to use it in your diesel-powered vehicle.

And then you have much, much energy in your stockpile.

In colder climates, heating your apartment with energy you collect from solar batteries in the middle of winter is a suboptimal strategy.

Is this thread being astroturfed? This defence for the Cybertruck ITT is one of the least rational threads I've seen on HN in the past few years and if the CT was actually valuable tech it wouldn't be one of the worst selling vehicles of all time.

And the additional value of Cybertruck in this question is about $1000 - $1500. $1k of additional value for $60k purchase is still a selling point, but marginally small selling point.

Take it from a Ukrainian.

PS: my dual-fuel gasoline/LPG Renault Twingo in Poland will outrun any Cybertruck on the continent.

And, unlike electricity, you can stockpile gasoline.

Source: I've mucked up multiple small engines with bad stored gas.

Propane, sure, but now you're talking about something fairly exotic, at least in terms of vehicles you can buy "off the shelf."

In any case, you can't produce propane yourself. You can "produce" electrons with a solar panel.

But for conversations sake, if we're talking about diesel trucks, and specifically an old mechanical diesel like a 7.3 ford or a 12 valve cummins, and we're talking about stored diesel, ideally a class D died diesel with a high sulfer content, then you'll get considerably more lifetime out of it than the recommended 18-24 months.

Additionally, you can burn about anything, old motor oil, fry oil, diesel with algee in it if you treat it and change your filters. A good, mechanical, not very picky diesel will burn fuel that is 20+ years old. Not forever, and you'll go through some filters and maybe injectors. By the time you get to fuel sources that can't be burned in a machine like that, or you've burned it up past your parts and ability to repair. you'll probably have a lot of other problems.

If we're talking generators, you can get off the shelf propane generators and propane stores well.

If you have a vehicle that runs on gasoline, you don't have to store gasoline for a long time to have a stockpile.

The cost of a few empty canisters is by far smaller than the cost of solar batteries, and putting gas into a vehicle in case of an emergency within a span of seconds rather than hours is a huge asset.

Not to mention: not everyone has space for solar. City dwellers are particularly constrained (as in: people who live in apartment complexes).

Finding space for a solar battery installation is a bit harder.

Not to mention: your Cybertruck isn't going to power your 7th floor apartment. You can probably figure out why.

Where I'm located, in most cases when there is an outage, neighboring areas do have power.

Specifically for my model 3, I've been considering tapping into the HV system manually to keep my Ecoflow battery topped up, but I wish there was a way to directly connect it.

1. America is huge. Comparing it to places in Europe is like comparing it to New Hampshire.

2. American has imported tons of people who are incapable of sustaining a high standard of living on their own. It only takes a few percent shift in GDP/person to change how much infrastructure you can build and maintain unless you are truly willing to let all the folks with less than a high school education and no special job skills live in favelas.

Iceland (part of Europe) is the size of Florida with 2/3 the population of Wyoming. 20% of Iceland’s population are 1st generation immigrants. Neither of those facts prevents Iceland from filling in, upgrading, and maintaining their infrastructure. The two week power blackout which GP’s friend experienced is unheard of in Iceland. And every population center, no matter how remote and low population (we are talking fewer then 100) still gets broadband internet via traditional infrastructure.

I also want to note that I did not compare America with Europe, you did that. And it is a determent to your argument (as if your racism didn’t do that already).

You know that Helene was a category 4 hurricane that crossed six states, affected tens of millions of people and cause $78 billion dollars in damage. It was a major event like nothing that has ever happened in Iceland. That level of event in Iceland would remove it as a going concern.

It is. Education has been an excuse for discrimination for a long time. When you describe a whole demographic as being uneducated you are applying exactly the kind of rhetoric which white Rhodesians used to excuse their discrimination[1].

> You know that Helene was a category 4 hurricane that crossed six states.

A Volcano erupted in the town of Grindavík, the main line which connected the town to it’s power plant, went under lava. The town was out of power for a maximum of 2 or 3 days.

But in any case, 2 week long blackouts are extremely common in the USA regardless of the severity of the natural disaster. When I first moved to the Seattle area in 2016 a common snow storm caused a blackout which lasted for 2 weeks in some areas outside of Seattle. The reason for the length of the blackouts in the USA is simply due to the quality and maintenance of the infrastructure and any lack of action plans to fix them when they break.

1: https://youtu.be/SLmD23UpLOo?si=hnyOlxPqDmWwQfRp&t=1299

I've lived in the Seattle area since 2007. There has not been any power outage that affected 3000+ homes that has lasted longer than a day.

Additionally, Seattle area does not have common snow storms. It has extremely infrequent snow storms and thus has no reason to have lots of cold weather equipment. What we do have is frequent wind storms and lots and lots of trees (orders of magnitude more trees than all of Iceland, for example) and the wind often knocks trees into power lines and those are fixed in less than a day. In terms of neglect, that's not a problem. The longest outage I've ever had in the suburbs is 18 hours.

The real reason for the long duration blackouts is not failure to maintain infrastructure, it's because of natural disasters that damage and destroy entire swaths of infrastructure in a single event over thousands of sq km.

I agree. One can judge America’s lousy infrastructure and lack of action plan on its own merits. There is no reason to bring Europe into this. All I am saying is, America’s sparse population, nor the education level of immigrants is not an excuse.

The EU invested about 9% more relative to GDP, while the U.S. invested more dollars per resident because its economy is much richer.

American infrastructure is bad, the boomers in charge have no idea how to get anything done anymore, with California being the case study of nimbyism.

Modern Zimbabwe is not particularly known for having reliable electric infrastructure, even by the low standards of sub-Saharan Africa. This is not a good argument against the parent commenter's point.

the thing all american states have in common is their american ideology, their american political economy, and their population of americans. it just so happens that these are almost always found, coincidentally or not, alongside extremely outdated and poorly-maintained infrastructure, and a class of ultra-rich parasites hoarding many of the resources. drawing connections between any of these phenomena is left as an exercise to the reader

And there's actually a good chance that PG&E is not being paid: most of the big tech companies have large solar installations covering the parking lot which power all the EV chargers, so they cut PG&E out of it entirely and produce their own power.

PG&E has special tariffs for meters that are used only for powering commercial EV chargers ("BEV1" and "BEV2"). They're about half of what a residential consumer would pay for an EV-only meter (the "EV-B" tariff).

But it's not bad to ride out the first couple of days if you've got 120kWh just sitting in your garage.

Ford has also marketed their hybrid F150 as being able to power home appliances for several years.

Ice storms/blizzards in the upper midwest can last days and make roads impassible to the point where they can't/don't fix the very many downed lines until the storm passes enough that they don't have to deprioritize rural roads and outages.

It's just not safe/possible to fix a line downed by ice when it's -30 out in blizzard conditions even if the trucks could navigate the roads.

This turns into the occasional several day outage for some folks.

I've also lived in parts of cities that essentially were impossible to have power failures absent very local equipment failures (like the power equipment attaching my building to the grid failing once) because the lines were underground and there was a power plant very close by.

It depends on a lot of things and lots of people assume everywhere else is just like where they are.

In what universe is backup power a niche use case?

I'd have animals too but society is still stable enough to provide me with food.

At 6000lbs+ it's a section 179 write off; if you combine that with some of the previous incentives the car was not that expensive to the right population.

I expect that the charging station will be in an industrial park with an industrial power supply.

The option to cut power are negotiated into the service contracts.

For instance an aluminum smelter may need a certain amount of notice to shut down their machinery, so they may negotiate an hour of notice or whatever they need. The power company may have to briefly load shed residential while still in the notice period, but then they take the smelter offline and restore service.

I find it highly likely that high consumption electric car fast charging site would negotiate to be the first in line to have their power cut given they don't have any equipment that could be damaged and they'd be most interested in discounted power.

I was remembering how critical infrastructure stays on. Most critical infrastructure is commercial.

However, a business park or an office block gets cut off with the homes.

With climate change causing more extreme weather events and an aging and increasingly more and more difficult to update power grid facing unprecedented strains, I think power disruptions like this are more likely than less. So it makes sense when you look forward rather than backwards in time.

Just really confused on how "smart readers" can get so scoped in to see a single point rather than the wider view. Forest through the trees something something

Natural disasters are often niche cases, and often life-or-death as well.

(This post doubles as an indictment of PG&E.)

Many super charger stations are located very close to the actual substations, so there’s a high likelihood of available power.