Another Reason To Buy a Nissan Leaf: It Can Power Your House For Two Days

Hate power outages but don't have a generator? Find generators too noisy and disruptive?

Well, if you're the owner of a Nissan Leaf electric car, the automaker has some good news for you: in the near future, you might be able to power your house with your car in an emergency or to save money and shrink your carbon footprint.

While it sounds a little weird, Nissan says the Leaf can actually feed power from its lithium-ion battery back into a family home and run appliances for up to two days during power outages. The project, called “Leaf to Home,” was unveiled by Nissan on Tuesday.

The system reportedly works via a connection from the car's quick charging port to the house's electricity distribution panel. Power can also be fed the other way if the house generates its own electricity with rooftop solar panels, says Nissan.

The lithium-ion batteries of the Leaf electric car have a capacity of 24 kilowatt hours when fully charged. This is equivalent to the electricity used by an average Japanese household in two days, estimates Nissan. (Of course, since Americans and Canadians are the largest per-capita users of electricity in the world, a North American household would probably have to cut way back on power to get that two days' worth of juice.)

The output from the vehicle comes to six kilowatts, says Nissan, enough to power even high energy appliances such as a refrigerator, air conditioner and washing machine at the same time, apparently.

Nissan says in addition to providing emergency power during blackouts, the car-to-home power feed could serve another, “greener” purpose: owners can charge the car's battery during nighttime off-peak electricity hours (when rates are usually cheaper) and use the electricity in the house during daytime high-demand periods, when rates are higher and utility companies are more apt to be buying additional juice from older, dirtier generation plants.

Nissan, which is 44 percent owned by Renault of France, said it aims to commercialize the technology in Japan by March 2012.