Where Were You When The Lights Went Out?

A few years ago, there was a power outage in my neighborhood. Every house on the street was dark — except one. While the rest of us struggled to figure out how to cook dinner, Manfred Wissemann, proud owner of a Nissan Leaf sat in a well-lit room playing his piano as his daughter got the evening meal ready.

A week before Christmas, 750,000 BC Hydro customers on Vancouver Island, the Gulf Islands and lower mainland lost power in an outage that lasted more than a week for some.

Yet many of them didn’t face the prospect of emptying out their refrigerators or wondering how they were going to get a hot meal into their children or charge phones to keep abreast of the recovery efforts. Those people were, like Manfred, the owners of electric cars.

The process for using the electricity stored in an EV battery to provide power in an emergency is relatively simple and requires little in the way of additional equipment.

In most cases, simply attaching a power inverter with battery cables to the EV battery is all that’s required. But the Owner’s Manual for your particular model will stipulate exactly what you need to do.

The following videos illustrate the basics.