How Ford F-150 Lightning Electric Pickup Can Power Your House for 10 Days
Spend an afternoon driving the Ford F-150 Lightning around the vineyards and redwood-shaded back roads of California wine country and the pickup’s considerable power is apparent. What makes the electric version of America’s best-selling vehicle a potential game-changer, though, is not its acceleration (zero to 60 miles per hour in 4.3 seconds) or its range (up to 320 miles on a charge). Rather it’s the technology that taps the Lightning’s battery pack to power your home or the electric grid itself during increasingly frequent climate-driven blackouts.
The extended-range Lightning’s 131 kilowatt-hour lithium-ion pack boasts almost 10 times the capacity of a Tesla Powerwall, an $11,000 home backup battery that can’t be driven to the supermarket. The Lightning is “a mini powerplant for your home,” says Jason Glickman, executive vice president for engineering, planning and strategy at California utility PG&E Corp. “It can support the grid on a hot summer day, when we have demand spiking.”
“At scale, when these vehicles are enabled to send energy back to the grid, flex alerts and notices of grid emergencies will be a thing completely of the past,” adds Glickman, whose utility is testing how to integrate the truck into its management of the grid.
He’s speaking from the tailgate of a Lightning, one of three parked on a hill overlooking vineyards at Dutton Ranch in Sebastopol, along with a top Ford executive and the president of Sonoma County Winegrowers, an association of 1,800 farmers that promotes sustainable agriculture. Ford staged the event earlier this month to showcase a pilot program that’s supplying Dutton Ranch and two other local farms with electric pickups and vans as part of a service called Ford Pro that helps
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