Crypto News: Ford's powerplant pickup

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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). It's the ability to tap the Lightning's battery pack to power your home or the electric grid 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. "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."

A Ford F-150 Lightning at Vino Farms in Healdsburg, California. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Glickman spoke earlier this month from the tailgate of one of three Lightnings 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 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 businesses manage their vehicle fleets.

The Lightning is the first EV sold in the US with bi-directional charging capability enabled to supply electricity back to homes and the grid. The family-owned farms' embrace of this feature indicates the prospects for transforming battery-powered pickups into vehicles to decarbonize the economy and build resilience against climate change.

Sonoma County Winegrowers president Karissa Kruse, speaking over a sound system plugged into a Lightning, says that at first, "growers were skeptical and there wasn't a lot of enthusiasm for going electric, especially in their trucks. Now they're like, 'Can I get in on the pilot program? I heard you could get us a truck.'"

While electric vehicles are often referred to as batteries on wheels, the Lightning might be better described as a mobile power strip. The extended-range Lightning features a 240-volt outlet in the truck bed that can power heavy-duty machinery from 9.6 kilowatts of carbon-free electricity generated onboard. There are also two 120-volt outlets in the cab, four in the bed and another four in the cavernous front trunk that Ford calls a "Mega Power Frunk."

"The real value right off the bat is the gas savings, as California gas prices are out-of-sight," says Steve Dutton, a fifth-generation farmer and co-owner of Dutton Ranch, which is powered in part by a solar array.

The pickup's ability to keep the lights on is another big draw, as wildfires and heat waves have triggered seasonal blackouts in recent years. "If there's a power outage and the truck is parked at one of my boys' houses, and he can run the house off the battery, that's awesome," says Dutton, who's married to Kruse.

Transforming a Lightning into a home generator requires Ford's 80-amp charging station and a $3,895 home integration system from Sunrun. The cost of installing Sunrun's system varies depending on the home and location. The charging station comes with the extended-range version of the Lightning and is a $1,310 option for buyers of the standard 230 mile-range version of the pickup.

The version of the pickup aimed at commercial fleets, called the Lightning Pro, starts at $39,974 before state and federal rebates and tax credits.

If the Lightning is plugged in when a blackout hits, the home automatically begins drawing electricity from the battery. When power is restored, the system disconnects and then resumes charging the vehicle. Ford says the Lightning can fully power an average home for roughly three days.

Linda Zhang, the Lightning's chief engineer, at Vino Farms. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

"That's a house like my house with AC, Xbox, kids going crazy leaving lights on everywhere," says Linda Zhang, chief engineer of the F-150 Lightning. With more frugal use, the Lightning could keep a home running for up to 10 days.

Zhang, who has the backup system installed at her home, says half of retail reservations for the Lightning are from people who have never owned a truck. "That new customer to trucks is really being brought in, in my mind, by the Mega Power Frunk and by the Pro Power Onboard," she says. "And some people are just truly, really interested in this product as a backup generator." — Todd Woody

A green hydrogen plant in Puertollano, Spain. Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

A world desperate for a climate-friendly fuel is pinning its hopes on hydrogen, seeing it as a way to power factories, buildings, ships and planes without pumping carbon dioxide into the sky. But scientists warn hydrogen leaked into the atmosphere can contribute to climate change much like carbon. Depending on how it's made, distributed and used, it could even make warming worse over the next few decades.

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