Today, we all rely heavily on our mobile phones in an emergency. It’s the first thing you reach for to call for help. But what if, in a total blackout, all the cell towers go down as well? Then even a small EV like the Renault R5 E-Tech Electric can be a guardian angel.
Austrian A1 Telekom, Renault Österreich, and the municipality of Raasdorf near Vienna ran a pilot showing that EVs with Vehicle-to-Load (V2L) can supply a mobile base station with emergency power, even for an extended period, to allow emergency communications.
Power-failure resilience
Why does it matter? Mobile operators invest a significant amount of engineering in power-failure resilience. The approach depends on the site’s criticality (a small rural mast versus a significant urban hub) and regulatory requirements.
Unlike the major telecom infrastructure hubs, such as switching centers, data hubs, and high-traffic urban masts, which have their own diesel-generator backup, almost every base station site today has a sealed lead-acid (VRLA) battery as a backup, or increasingly, lithium-ion batteries.
The typical autonomy is 30 minutes to 4 hours for a macro cell, depending on traffic, size, and operator policy. The purpose is to bridge short outages or cover the time until a generator or technician arrives. But what if, for example, a mountain village were to become completely isolated, with no way of reaching it?
Today, there’s a good chance that a villager with a small electric car could provide a lifeline, at least restoring emergency communications with the rest of the world. Austria’s A1 Telekom proved it can be done in a village with fewer than 1,000 residents near Vienna.
Making the local mast suitable to ‘survive’ on V2L power from a small car like the Renault R5 E-Tech Electric is quite simple. The mast site must have a properly rated, best weatherproof AC input socket where the EV can be connected safely via its V2L output.
The R5 E-Tech Electric is one of the first small EVs to use an 11 kW bidirectional AC charger that is compatible with V2L (Vehicle-to-Load) and V2G (Vehicle-to-Grid) functionalities. V2G means it can deliver power back to the grid, V2L means it can power up electric tools at 230V, like power tools or household appliances.
Powering household appliances
The R5 E-Tech supports V2L with a maximum AC output of 3.7 kW. You can run quite a lot of typical household or emergency appliances, as long as you don’t exceed that ceiling.
To give you a sense, a refrigerator-freezer requires 100 to 300 watts of power when the compressor is on. LED lighting for a home consumes 10 to 200 W, depending on the number of rooms.
The washing machine (excluding heating) requires 500 W to 1 kW during spin cycles, or a small portable heater/air conditioner, with a power consumption of 1.5 to 2.5 kW. The primary limitation is avoiding the simultaneous operation of multiple high-draw devices.
Renault’s V2L provides AC up to 16 A (~3.7 kW at 230 V) when the car is stationary, enough for modest continuous loads. Exact runtime depends on the site’s draw and the car’s remaining battery.
Powering a telecom mast
Many rural mini telecom sites idle close to 0.8 to 1.5 kW; urban multi-sector sites can be higher. With a 52 kWh battery pack, 85% end-to-end efficiency, and maintaining a 15% SoC reserve, the Renault could keep a mobile mast alive for 46-47 hours at a 0.8 site load, up to 12 hours at 3.00 kW.
With the 40 kWh pack of the entry version, this would be 35 hours in the first case, 9-10 hours with the maximum load. In winter, in a small mountain village with sub-zero temperatures, this would be less, as overall delivered energy can be about 22% lower.
But in that case, couldn’t you bring in another EV? Or two cars in parallel, doubling both capacity and max output, as another option? That’s precisely what telecom operators like A1 in Austria have in mind with this experiment.
“In an emergency, an electric car can be used as a mobile power bank to keep operations going for longer,” Christian Zeindlhofer, Head of Risk and Resilience Management at A1, told the Austrian technology news portal Heise online.
As the fleet of available EVs grows, this opens up new perspectives, A1 points out. “These EVs form a nationwide network of mobile energy storage systems. In an emergency, the batteries in these vehicles can be used specifically to protect and maintain critical infrastructure such as mobile phone masts, which are particularly at risk in the event of a blackout.”
A Belgian blackout?
Consider further: how many EVs would you need with a total blackout to maintain emergency communications throughout Belgium? Think in the low thousands of EVs, not tens of thousands, if you only keep a priority slice of sites alive and you use emergency roaming.
With some AI-powered math, the estimate is that powering nearly every macro site, some 6,000 to 7,000 sites, would require 6,000 to 7,000 EVs. To maintain a priority layer of communication masts, 1,800 to 2,100 would be sufficient. If the blackout lasts 48 hours, double that if you can’t recharge or rotate.
As of August 1, 2025, Belgium had 395,188 battery-electric passenger cars registered, according to Statbel. However, they’re not yet all capable of V2L. But the fleet is growing steadily.
