'Powerless'?

Last week, a great winter storm left "about 1.3 million homes and businesses from Pennsylvania to Maine were plunged into the dark — and cold — by a storm that coated trees and wires with ice Thursday night into Friday. Most of the outages were in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine and New York. About 880,000 remained without power Saturday afternoon."
This is according to the AP report.

As usual, utilities rush into great danger attempting to repair power lines as they deal with downed trees.
What nobody is reporting is that there is currently available a vehicle that would help with power outages. A hydrid electric vehicle, capable of producing tens of kwatts of power for several hours, could power a home for several days.
Let's start at the beginning. A hybrid vehicle has an electric motor that moves the vehicle, and either a battery or an engine, or both, to power the motor. The hybrid vehicle must be able to accelerate at regular rates to keep up with traffic. This means that the motor has be able to produce at least 50 kwatt of energy.
If the hybrid vehicle has batteries, then the batteries have to be able to provide electrical power for at least several hours to be practical.
What does this have to do with the power outage? If an owner of a hybrid electric vehicle that has batteries has wired the vehicle up to the home, then in the event of a power outage, the vehicle's batteries can be used to power the home.
If the homeowner conserves energy, the vehicle might be able to run the home for at least two days, and probably a lot longer.
In the years ahead as hybrid vehicles become common place more and more people are going to be self-sufficient, at least for several days, in the event of an outage.