Some 250,000 electric vehicles manufactured by General Motors are driving around the US today—right now!—with an oft-secret capability: Their big, powerful batteries can charge other things. Potentially appliances, homes, and now, thanks to a software update pushed by the automaker this week, an electrical grid. Twelve of GM’s EVs have this “bidirectional charging” capability, way more than US competitors’ battery-electrics.
The potential for this tech, known as vehicle-to-grid charging, is exciting. An EV should not only be able to power a home through a days-long outage. It should also support the wider grid, helping utilities balance out electricity use during periods of high demand, like the moment the heat becomes undesirable and everyone turns on their air-conditioning at once. Even better, car owners can charge up their batteries on wheels when demand and prices are low, and discharge it into the wider grid when it's high—making them money in the process. The company can “turn every GM EV on the road into a distributed power resource,” said Sterling Anderson, the automakers' chief product officer, at a company event in San Francisco on Tuesday.
As US automakers work through policy about-faces that have upended EV sales projections in the US, forays into energy solutions like bidirectional charging give car companies opportunities to train their battery-making muscles. Anderson also says that while V2G charging looks like an automaking side quest, it also helps GM answer the bigger and maybe even existential question of, “How do we make a car more valuable?” Maybe it can be really fun to drive. Maybe, one day, it can drive itself and run your errands. Or maybe, one day, it can make energy for you when it’s plugged in in your driveway.
But as any parent knows, the chasm between potential and reality can gape. To use their cars to power their homes, drivers need to buy a $20,000 system from the automaker's four-year-old GM Energy subsidiary and have it installed by someone who knows what they’re doing. Also, they need to make sure their local utilities—and there are nearly 3,000 of them across the US—have worked with GM to not only OK the equipment but also to create programs that guarantee the owner money when their car helps out their whole region’s electrical grid. (GM says homeowners generally get that $20,000 up-front price back after five or so years of use.)
Though a quarter-million Americans have GM vehicles with the bidirectional charging capacity, GM Energy’s customers number only in the “thousands,” according to the company. (A spokesperson declined to share more specific numbers.)
Still, Wade Sheffer, GM Energy’s vice president, insists: The reason more people aren't using their cars to power their lives comes down to “awareness, awareness, and awareness.” To that end, at Tuesday’s event the subsidiary announced two partnerships with utilities: a “stress test” of bidirectional charging capabilities with 30 GM employees, enabled by Michigan’s DTE Energy, and a plan to get 52,000 GM EVs on PG&E’s major Northern California grid by 2030. The automaker says it has worked out dozens of partnerships with other utilities.
Still, getting all of those GM cars hooked up and contributing to the grid will be a long and likely winding road. Not all states are enthusiastic about EVs or new energy tech right now. And even in early adopter states, where lawmakers are gung ho about innovative climate and energy policies, vehicle-to-grid tech is still in its early stages.
It took researchers with UC Irvine several years of collaboration with Kia and Hyundai to get a vehicle-to-home charging project up and running in six Southern California homes. “Here we are two years later—not four weeks later—and utilities around the country are just beginning to address this,” says Scott Samuelsen, who directed the project and is a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UC Irvine. “It’s very new.” The project hopes to discover how EV’s bidirectional charging abilities might fit into normal people’s lives—and, eventually, save them money.
In March, Washington state’s Puget Sound Energy announced a pilot program that the utility is hoping will teach it to work with new sorts of companies—auto manufacturers, vehicle charging firms—while supporting the wider electrical grid. The project will run through early next year. Key among the utility’s tasks is guaranteeing different automakers’ and charging companies’ equipment can talk to each other, using the same sorts of standards. Clint Stewart, a senior product development manager at PSE, describes himself as a “techno-optimist”; he believes bidirectional charging is coming at scale. But not right away. “I’d like to believe that in five years, we’ll be at a point where it’s relatively figured out,” he says.
On GM’s to-do list: ensuring customers have complete control of when their vehicles’ top the grid, so that they’re not stranded with no charge when they need to unplug and get somewhere. Eventually, the system might learn a car owners’ schedule and know not to suck out the EV’s charge right before, say, the kids’ soccer practice. There are a few things to work out.
GM Energy’s Sheffer is eager to meet the moment. “We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how drivers interact with their vehicles and turn them into something more than just transportation,” he says.
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