For Dr. Erica Lacher’s veterinary clinic, which provides round-the-clock emergency care for furry patients in Gainesville and North Central Florida, a power outage can be the difference between life and death.
After Hurricane Debby took power out for 36 hours in some parts of Gainesville in August, Dr. Lacher knew exactly what to do before the next disaster struck: fully recharge her two electric cars, a Ford F-150 Lightning and Kia EV9. Both of those get bidirectional charging, a feature that lets EV owners power external devices and appliances using the vehicle’s battery.
“Because we're a vet clinic, we have to be available for emergencies,” Dr. Lacher told InsideEVs. Both of those vehicles would be able to run critical devices if the power was knocked out, including "fans, our entire surgery suite, the refrigerator stock, our computers, our phones," she said.
That next disaster was Hurricane Helene, which left a path of destruction hundreds of miles long across several states in the southeastern U.S. last week, including North Carolina, Georgia and Florida.
According to local reports, millions of homes lost power due to destroyed transmission lines and the death toll had topped 180 as of Thursday morning, making it the deadliest storm after Katrina in 2005.
When Dr. Lacher drove to work the morning after the devastating storm, she said her power lines were down, but luckily she had two giant battery packs ready to power her clinic. She pulled up the F-150 Lightning next to her clinic building, plugged one end of the cable into the power outlet in the bed of her truck and the other end into the generator transfer switch.
Just like that, power came back on and Dr. Lacher went back to work. “We had dogs and cats coming in. And we also have two horses in the hospital. It definitely saved lives,” Dr. Lacher told InsideEVs.
“Basically we were able to be back up and running as a business in five minutes,” she said. Not having to wait in long lines at the gas stations was also a huge relief, she added.
The standard range F-150 Lightning has a 98 kilowatt-hour battery pack, which was enough to power her clinic from Friday through Monday. The Kia EV9's battery pack is no slouch, either; Popular Science reports it can power a home for as much as four days.
Bidirectional charging is one of the most underrated features in electric cars. It allows owners to use their EV’s battery as a portable power bank to run external appliances and devices. It’s also known as vehicle-to-load (V2L) while more specific types of bidirectional charging include vehicle-to-home (V2H), vehicle-to-grid (V2G) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V).
This can be useful in situations like blackouts caused due to natural disasters, during camping, or at construction sites. And in specific use cases like this one, it can even help save lives.
Electric cars and V2L are becoming somewhat of a permanent fixture in how we deal with natural disaster-caused power outages. They're becoming reliable assets for backup power for a growing number of EV owners.
And new EV buyers are delighted by the feature. Rob Barnet, a broadcast operations manager at a local television station in Savannah, Georgia took delivery of his Hyundai Ioniq 5 less than a week ago. He told InsideEVs that winds blasting at speeds of 80 mph toppled trees in Savannah, which took out the transmission lines. He wasn’t expecting power to be out for several days, so he tried the V2L function on his Ioniq 5.
He ran some extension cords which powered his lights, fans and the refrigerator, consuming about four to five percent of the battery per day. The EV's battery could have easily powered his home for a week, he said.
“I don't have to worry about the maintenance, pollution and just the inconsistency of gas generators,” he said.
Multiple owners told InsideEVs or shared their experiences on Reddit, how EVs equipped with V2L like Hyundai Ioniq 5, Ford F-150 Lightning, Kia EV6 and Kia EV9 have been powering critical appliances during Hurricane Helene.
Their stories echoed what EV owners in Houston told InsideEVs back in July about how their Kia EV6s powered homes as Hurricane Beryl hammered parts of the Texas gulf coast. Many of them said they prefer using EVs instead of gas generators, which can be noisy, need maintenance and release toxic fumes.
“If we don't have power, we're in an apocalyptic event because of where we are situated,” Dr. Lacher said. “Most of the time, the generator just sits there and does nothing, so it makes so much sense to take that money and instead put it into an EV that does a whole lot of things."
Contact the author: suvrat.kothari@insideevs.com
