Yesterday I posted about our experience getting through the big storm, but I didn’t say anything about what it was like to own an EV during that time. You know why? It was … completely uneventful. If I had it to do over again, I would have been smarter about charging the car before the outage, but we entered the outage with around 65% and still had over 50% when it was done. We didn’t change anything because we had an EV. If we need to charge it, there were still plenty of superchargers in the area that were open and functioning normally. I heard about some lines during peak times but I wouldn’t have had a problem going during a quiet time.
Could I have charged it from the generator? Theoretically… maybe. The generator puts out 3.5kW which is roughly how fast I normally charge the car, but as I mentioned in my post yesterday, our generator doesn’t have an inverter and I’m not sure I want to risk hooking the car up to it. It would also be hugely inefficient versus just driving to a supercharger
Having an EV in a situation like this will hopefully be a big benefit going forward. Some EVs support standards that let you hook them into your house panel giving you a day or two of power before you have to recharge. That sounds a lot better to me than running a generator. Unfortunately Tesla isn’t on board with that yet.