How cool would it be to be able to use your Volt as a generator. There are many people who would buy a Volt just as a backup power source I would imagine. I think this is a good idea because I would imagine that many people who are buying a Volt are trying to be prepared for future unfavorable eventualities such as gasoline shortages or just high gas prices, there's also the other side of the coin that I'm sure they'd like to be prepared for - electricity shortages, power outages in case of a downed tree or stolen power lines for the copper (to name a few possible eventualities). It would be a great selling point to tell people their car can be their personal power source if they need to. I got the idea after reading this article. It's also mobile (obviously) so if their mom loses electricity they can bring it to her house. etc.

http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/prius-its-not-just-a-car-its-an-emergency-generator/?em

Here's a couple of real-world applications.

http://www.priups.com/

http://home.hiwaay.net/~bzwilson/prius/priups.html

There's a couple of ways to do it basically; use the 12V battery system to run an inverter, limited to about 1KW, or use the traction battery directly, supposedly limited to about 3KW or so. The second method is harder to accomplish because of the 200V-300V traction battery voltage, I think the first link above uses this voltage to directly charge/replace the 200+V batteries in a UPS which eliminates having a separate DC-DC inverter.

I think the Volt would have even more promise for this purpose.

I agree. I'm not sure how many mods were done, but I doubt the Prius gas engine is really intended to efficiently produce electricity whereas the Volt system is engineered with that end in mind from the start so it's just a hop skip and a jump away from being as good as any stand alone generator you can buy.

That would be so awesome. You could tow your Volt behind your RV and plug it into the RV when you go camping in the boonies. This would be good for what JeffNY does when he wants to get away and stay on his extra land that doesn't have a house or electricity.

You could even take your Volt tent camping and use it to plug in televisions and lights and a mini refrigerator and stuff if you wanted.

It would be cool to have an option of an AC outlet where a cigarette lighter would be in the center console. Then if someone wants to run multiple items, they can just hook up a power strip and run whatever they want when they are driving (ie charge their laptop, camera battery, or cell phone for those who don't have a car charger for their cell phone like myself, etc.) and with an extension cord, they can run a line outside into a tent while camping, to a mobile heater, or TV and DVD player, video games, whatever they want. They could run their house off of it if their power is ever out for extended periods of time.

I don't foresee much extra work involved to make this feature available. I am assuming that the gas engine is already going to be set to turn off when the battery charges up to a certain point when the car is stationary for a while and not using the electrical power being generated. With the charge computer set to a "generator mode", it could allow the battery to charge up to a higher level than it normally should (I have no idea what that level is) charge the battery to when it's primary function is powering the electric motor, like 60-70% or maybe 80% and then let it run back down to 30% SOC (like usual) before running the gas engine again. This would allow the engine to not have to start and stop so often. The only work that would need to be done is to put an inverter in the vehicle that transforms the battery power to 120V AC, a high amperage line to the AC outlet in the vehicle instead of the chintzy line that normally runs to a cigarette lighter, and then add the "generator mode" to the computer that lets the battery charge to a higher level than normal so that the engine doesn't have to turn on and off so often. This "generator mode" is really just a guess I am making that might be helpful although probably not a big deal anyway.

Does anyone else see any complications I'm not thinking of? It sounds like the easiest and cheapest way to make this car even awesomer.

One other thing I was going to say is that adding an "AC out" next to where the "AC in" is now (by the driver's side view mirror) would be a good place for it since it's protected from the elements. This would probably require a little more work for the vehicle designers but it would be worth it for the convenience.

Thinking about this topic some more. These cars would work much better than a normal standalone generator in fact because a normal generator runs the gas engine and any electricity that is not used is wasted gas, the Volt would have a battery to balance out the peaks and troughs of demand usage which would mean that since the engine knows exactly when to turn on to charge the battery and when the battery is fully charged, it won't waste a lot of electricity. Say you have a 3,000 Watt generator. It would be cranking out 3,000 Watts for 24 hours until your power went back on, where as your Volt would be able to crank out 3,000 Watts for 5 minutes while your run your microwave, and then drop down to 1,000 Watts to power just a few light bulbs and your refrigerator or something. So the Volt's engine might run for 16 hours of the 24. Your Volt would be much more efficient.

Therefore this feature that could be added for a few hundred dollars would be worth more than a standalone generator is worth, $1,500?

12V DC to 110V AC inverters us a step up DC-DC system to get the 12V DC up to ~160V DC before they invert it to AC.

That step up process is not 100% efficient and is the source of most of the Inverter power loses.

skip the DC-DC conversion.

Tap the main traction battery directly to the inverting phase.

Heck... the Volt already has an inverter in the Motor Controller to pull the DC traction battery and change it to AC for the drive motor... The AC would just need to be adapted to match the household AC.

The Volt OEM DC to AC system is already built to handle far more power than your house will ever ask for.

120V for 100 Amp service is ~12 kW ... with no power cut backs at all... The Volt 16 kWh battery can easily supply your whole houses power needs for ~1 Hour... if you only powered essential things , and cut back your power usage... you could easily stretch the battery to last a full day before the gasoline engine would even have to turn on at all.

This is no longer academic:
http://green.yahoo.com/blog/ecogeek/864/a-prius-can-power-your-home-in-a-snowstorm.html

"John Sweeney ran his fridge, freezer, wood stove fan and even his television and lights using his Prius for three days while the power was out in his town. By using an inverter to convert the car's DC power supply into household AC, Sweeney was able to generate 120 volts.

If GM doesn't provide this function then you can expect an aftermarket hack soon. ;)

Oh, and I'm assuming you will use the same plug. The Volt should be V2G compliant and that means it should be able to both sink and source energy. I'm looking forward to seeing the on-board charger specifications. Did they think ahead? Was that too expensive and two-way charging will be part of the next version?

I just acquired a half dozen 300V-12V 500W DC-DC inverters from a, ahem, recycler. These allegedly were pulled from some retired Cray computers.

My plan is to tap the traction battery in the Prius to feed the inverters directly. I'll parallel 6 of them to get up to 3000W power handling. From there I'll patch the 12V side into a true sine wave 2KW continuous, 3KW peak inverter.

I'd like to be able to run the furnace fan and maybe a few "necessities" like the TV, microwave, computer etc.

I agree with IamIan that it would be nice to avoid the losses associated with the DC-DC conversion but that's not so easy to do from what I can tell, at least not for a weekend electrician like myself. 12V inverters are easy to get, reasonably priced and easy to resell if the project is a failure, or I win the lottery :D

I'll post back here when I get it running, or not.

Hummmmm, grease monkeys turn into sparkies. Who would have thought? Will guys soon be in their garages playing with oscilloscopes, soldering irons, computers and other EE toys? That would be excellent! Did you know that you could make an excellent robot with an EV that had four wheel-hub motors? Massive power at a fraction of the industrial cost. I can't wait to see what people come up with.

I still want to buy a totaled Volt, extract all the goodies and put them in a very lightweight tube-framed buggy. That thing would just about fly! Just use the battery, controller, charger and motor. You would get over a hundred miles of range so you wouldn't even need the ICE. Heck, throw in a motorcycle motor and small generator for limp-home mode for an extra challenge

I still want to buy a totaled Volt, extract all the goodies and put them in a very lightweight tube-framed buggy. That thing would just about fly! Just use the battery, controller, charger and motor. You would get over a hundred miles of range so you wouldn't even need the ICE. Heck, throw in a motorcycle motor and small generator for limp-home mode for an extra challenge
Damn, Texas! The Volts haven't even hit the road yet, and here you are talking about a wrecked one! How mechanically ghoulish!

(Do you think all the bits you want would be in usable shape after the car was totalled?)

Excellent idea. Whilst the Volt is the kick off for this power train and technology it would seem the real gains and market potential could be in commercial/emergency vehicle applications. A great opportunity for an imaginative GM. Hopefully they are up to the challenge ;)


How cool would it be to be able to use your Volt as a generator. There are many people who would buy a Volt just as a backup power source I would imagine. I think this is a good idea because I would imagine that many people who are buying a Volt are trying to be prepared for future unfavorable eventualities such as gasoline shortages or just high gas prices, there's also the other side of the coin that I'm sure they'd like to be prepared for - electricity shortages, power outages in case of a downed tree or stolen power lines for the copper (to name a few possible eventualities). It would be a great selling point to tell people their car can be their personal power source if they need to. I got the idea after reading this article. It's also mobile (obviously) so if their mom loses electricity they can bring it to her house. etc.

http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/prius-its-not-just-a-car-its-an-emergency-generator/?em

For the home individual hobbiest ... yeah it is a bit more difficult.

It shouldn't be technically hard to do the home AC generator from the traction battery part... at least not for GM... I mean the T-Zero (http://www.acpropulsion.com/tzero/) from a small start up company in 1996 built this already into the 150 kW DC to AC motor controller.

If a small start up can do a 150 kW version of this ~13 years ago. And the Combined controller that does the motor control , battery charging , AC grid interface is all a total of 70 pounds.... yeah today it should be a walk in the park for GM.

The only thing I think that would keep GM from doing it... is their perceived market demand for such a feature.