When Kat Hickey and her husband talked about what they would do if Tropical Cyclone Alfred knocked out the power in their north Brisbane home, they were more concerned than most.
The pair have a nine-month-old daughter and a three-year-old son – having a reliable way to sterilise bottles and boil water for formula was critical.
They knew the battery from their white BYD Atto 3 could power their home using the vehicle-to-load system (V2L) – a backup power system that allows the car battery to power appliances – but neither had actually hooked it up. They wondered how much it could handle.
When Alfred made landfall and they were among 450,000 homes to lose power, Hickey figured she had nothing to lose. She set to work snaking extension cords through the house as her husband baby-proofed the setup.
Together the couple hooked up a fridge, kettle, toaster, phone chargers, laptop charger and lamp – and then, she says, there was light.
“We called the lamp our canary,” she says. “It’s this little lamp that normally sits out of the way, we hardly ever use it. During the storm, it became essential. Whenever we were putting too much stress on the system, it would flicker or turn off completely.
“Afterwards, we had to thank it for its service, put it back in the corner, and it hasn’t been used since.”
Social media is filled with EV owners who delight in sharing clever and novel ways to take advantage of their vehicles. People have powered induction cookers and coffee machines when camping, while some drivers use V2L functionality to refuel EVs stranded on the roadside.
Not all electric vehicles have V2L capacity – Tesla’s Model Y and Model 3 do not come with the feature – but in the wake of ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred, these systems are again proving their worth as emergency generators in natural disasters.
It is not the first time. One woman made headlines in late 2023 when she used her BYD Atto 3 to power her son’s dialysis machine after devastating storms cut power to south-east Queensland.
Matt McLaughlin, another EV driver and a member of the Rural Fire Service (RFS), says the destruction caused by Tropical Cyclone Alfred is widespread where he lives in the Gold Coast hinterland.
During the storm, a three-tonne tree missed the bed where he and his wife slept by a metre and a half, taking out his deck and crushing his barbecue.
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With power unlikely to be restored for another week at least – a nearby power line was shredded in five places and fallen trees have made much of the area inaccessible – he says his family is doing well thanks to three EVs owned by his wife, his father and himself.
“I’m sitting here drinking my tea and charging my laptop,” he says. “The big one is being able to have internet. If you can run your modem on the car, with the NBN doing fibre to the home now, you have communications, which is important because with the towers down there’s just no mobile phone reception out here.”
With each battery in the two BYDs and the MG carrying 60kWh capacity – more than the 10kWh offered by a Tesla power wall – McLaughlin says these “batteries on wheels” mean they could keep the lights on for a month.
His work with the RFS has only highlighted the significance of this in recent days.
“On the weekend, we came across really elderly people trapped in their house: no power, trees on the driveway, no phones, no communications. They’re saying: ‘Is the power coming back on soon? All our food’s gone off,’” McLaughlin says. “So we’re doing welfare checks; we’re having to go back.”
It is this sort of situation that has prompted MyCar (formerly Kmart Tyre and Auto) to trial a program where EV drivers can register to help out during disaster recovery.
So far more 100 people have registered with “The Chargers”, a program that, when activated, sends a text message alert to those within 250km to be on standby to help out with further details to follow.
Adele Coswello, chief customer officer at MyCar, says the company coordinated with Energex and relief groups to support evacuation and community centres where needed on Thursday and Friday.
“Our research showed that three-quarters of Australians have experienced a power outage as a result of natural disasters,” Coswello says. “One mother told us she felt vulnerable going to sleep because her baby monitor wasn’t working.”
Though Alfred did not cause the level of destruction some feared, Hickey says the experience has made her car “that much more valuable” to her.
“I’m gradually converting my friends,” she says. “I have a friend who [is] a chemical engineer and used to work for one of those offshore rigs and even he’s in the pre-contemplation phase of having the next car be an EV.”
Any doubts she may have had about going electric are gone, she says, and she’s now thinking about long-term plans for swapping out their gas cooker for induction, a battery for their home solar panels as insurance, and potentially, electric hot water.
“It’s so amazing,” she says. “Next time I might try other things, see how far we can push the canary by plugging in things like the washing machine.”
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