(Image from Mitsubishi)
MAE Professor and SMERC Director Rajit Gadh was quoted in the Fast Company article “This SUV powers your house – and your house powers this SUV”.
From the article:
Mitsubishi isn’t the first company to propose this idea. As The Verge points out, Elon Musk has flirted with the concept of using Tesla vehicles to power homes in the past. And well before that, the UCLA Smart Grid Research Center proved that energy from inside EVs could be made available to buildings in a matter of seconds.
When I talked to Rajit Gadh, UCLA professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, about his research in this field back in 2016, he explained to me that, “Now the problem is to scale that from here [at UCLA] to a consumer product, which requires modification of consumer behavior. That takes time.” In 2019, we will have that consumer product. A single system, from a single company, will be able to share power from the sun to the home to the car back to the home.