You may be right Jed. It would be a nice problem to have to decide the best way to use LENR. My point was I don't think cars would be good battery resources for the grid either but the other way "might" be more feasible.
I agree that electric cars are not likely to be a battery resource for the grid. Reversing the charge to go from the car to the house is problematic. It is dangerous. It calls for a complicated automatic relay switch. The kind you use with a natural gas fired standby generator. This increases the cost of the generator by about $1500 compared to ordinary generators. See, for example:
As I said, chargers with remote turn on/turn off capabilities may be a good way for the power company to save money, but they are not like using a charged electric car to power the grid. They are a lot simpler and cheaper.
I think using an electric car to power the grid is a bad idea for another reason. You want an electric car to be fully charged, or as close to full as you can make it. You don't want to discharge it halfway to keep the grid running. Electric car range is a problem. I know this because I had an electric car for a while, which I gave to my daughter.
People will likely find creative ways to use all that excess power. It will likely take decades to displace centralized power production.
I think it will take 15 years from the start of intense manufacturing of cold fusion generators to displace centralized power production. The physical transition may not be complete after 15 years, but the power companies will all be going bankrupt. They cannot afford to service half as many customers as they now have, or one-tenth as many. They cannot maintain the grid, and they cannot reduce the size of the grid, or reduce grid maintenance costs. If they have 100 customers on a certain power line, and 50 customers buy cold fusion generators and terminate their electric company service, the power company still has to maintain the entire power line, with half the revenue. They cannot operate on that basis. Their profit margins are too small. They will go bankrupt, which will force their remaining customers to hustle out and buy cold fusion generators. I explained how this transition works here on pages 2 and 3:
https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJthefuturem.pdf
The 15 year limit is not arbitrary. It is a function of the service life of equipment, and the time it takes people to replace their furnaces and air conditioners. No one is going to dump a new furnace just to get the benefits of a cold fusion co-generator, but when the furnace wears out, no one is going to buy another gas or electrically fired furnace. People do not throw away tens of thousands of dollars for no reason.
Along similar lines, oil companies are set up to supply huge amounts of fuel, with pipelines and gigantic oil tankers. If they lose half of their market, they cannot afford to operate a gigantic oil tanker. It would sit around unused for weeks or months, gradually degrading. It would resemble the hundreds of sidelined railroad locomotives shown in this photo, which were used to haul coal before the market for coal fell by half:
In a few years, these locomotives will be scrap metal. They are not being maintained, and there is no use for them.
Some transitions are even more drastic and rapid, because the equipment does not last for 15 years, and the newer version is so much more cost effective. From 1982 to 1990, all minicomputer makes went out of business, and nearly all mainframe makers did. IBM came close to bankruptcy.
