Bringing it all back home

Notions of car and home working in tandem have been around for a long time; vehicles charging overnight at off-peak rates, then supplying homes with leftover energy in the evening when tariffs are high. The larger batteries paraded by today’s EVs make this an increasingly viable prospect, although admittedly one that has yet to fully take off.

“I think one thing people don’t truly appreciate is how much energy a car uses in comparison to a house,” Dr Paul Nieuwenhuis, from Cardiff University’s Electric Vehicle Centre of Excellence, told The Engineer. “You can run several houses off an electric car battery system. So even when the battery pack is no longer optimised for running the car, it can still run the house for quite some time.”

While true integration of car and home may still be some years away, manufacturers are tapping into the underlying principle with a new wave of energy storage devices such as Tesla’s Powerwall and Powerpack. The boom is the result of rapid advances across complimentary technologies – primarily solar and battery storage – as well as the means to link them effectively.