Using the car as an energy source (I): The car becomes an emergency power source

Cars have always been developed towards the direction of comfortable and convenient means of transportation. However, in the Great East Japan Earthquake, there were endless cases of using cars as emergency power generation and storage devices. Can cars be used as a new type of "power source" and become part of the future social infrastructure? This series will be divided into three parts, thinking about the energy source of cars.

The Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011 severely damaged the Pacific coast of Japan from the Tohoku to Kanto regions. A large-scale power outage occurred in the Tohoku region, and even without the tsunami, it took about a week to restore the power infrastructure in some areas, although it has been believed that power infrastructure would be "restored faster" than other social infrastructure.

During this period, life without electricity brought a lot of troubles to the people in the disaster area. For example, mobile phones.

The fixed-line telephone network was destroyed by the earthquake, and the only mobile phone network that could be relied on was also in a state of no calls after the earthquake. Moreover, although the mobile phone base stations were equipped with power storage devices to cope with short-term power outages, after a few hours of power outage, most base stations stopped working because the power storage devices ran out of power. Although some base stations barely maintained operation with their own generators and power supply vehicles, families that lost power were still unable to report safety information to the outside world because their mobile phones could not be charged. Even areas that were originally thought to be independent of electricity were affected by the power outage. In the Tohoku region of Japan, which was still in the severe cold season at the time, heating was essential. However, there were families who had kerosene but could not use heating for heating. This was because these families used kerosene-type heaters. The fan of kerosene-type heaters must be driven by electricity. Since the power supply in the entire Tohoku region was only about 20 to 30kW, many people could not escape the ravages of the severe cold.

Many people said that cars actually played a big role at this time. Not only as a means of movement and transportation, but also other functions of cars were used, including listening to and watching news on the car radio and TV, heating in the car, and the additional functions equipped in the car came in handy. In addition, many people said that "cars played a role as emergency power sources." Especially praised is the use of car cigarette lighters to charge mobile phones.

The cigarette lighter of a car has a power supply function that uses the battery (lead storage battery) equipped in the vehicle to provide 12V (24V for trucks) DC power. Recently, lead storage batteries in cars are widely used as power sources for many devices such as simple car navigation systems (PNDs) and portable music players.

As long as you have an adapter that can charge your phone from a cigarette lighter, you can charge your phone. In addition, some hybrid cars, including Toyota's Estima Hybrid, are equipped with a household power (AC100V) socket, and can even directly drive home appliances.

Electric vehicles can use the rotation of the engine to drive a small "AC generator" to charge the lead-acid battery. In other words, they are equipped with a small generator. In an emergency, just start the engine to charge the lead-acid battery, and you can drive low-power electrical appliances. Hybrid vehicles are equipped with larger generators (drive motors) and drive batteries (nickel-metal hydride batteries and lithium batteries), which can provide greater power. The maximum output power of the Estima hybrid vehicle is 1500W.

The socket that can be equipped with "Estima Hybrid". The maximum power that can be used is up to 1500W

In view of the important role that cars play as emergency power sources in disaster areas, Toyota President and Representative Director Akio Toyoda revealed at a meeting in April 2011 that the hybrid car "Prius" and the plug-in hybrid car scheduled to be launched in 2012 will be equipped with household power sockets. The sockets will be installed on Prius and other models from the beginning of 2012.

Since cars can be used as emergency power sources, are there any new ways to use them? According to this idea, cars should be able to be used as emergency power sources during the peak power period during the day.

Although it is difficult to use existing cars, considering the popularity of hybrid cars, plug-in hybrid cars, and electric cars equipped with large batteries in the future, people should start to seriously study the use of cars as power storage devices from now on. In fact, since a few years ago, discussions have been carried out around the world on the concept of "V2H (Vehicle to Home)" and "V2G (Vehicle to Grid)" for bidirectional connection and exchange of electricity between cars, homes, and cars and power grids.

The Prius plug-in hybrid vehicle was launched for limited lease sales in December 2009. It is planned to start mass production in 2012 at a scale of tens of thousands per year.