General Motors and utility Pacific Gas & Electric are working together to determine how electric vehicles can be used to power people's homes during blackouts -- or even peak hours. Feed electricity back into the grid when on demand. The pilot will take place in PG&E's home state of California, where wildfires are straining the state's energy infrastructure.
GM is the latest automaker to team up around the idea of "vehicle-to-grid" technology with utility. (PG&E has also partnered with BMW for a similar idea.) The idea is to use bi-directional charging equipment to push and pull energy from electric vehicles at any given time. In short, it considers high-capacity batteries not only to power EVs but also as backup storage cells for the electrical grid.
Rick Spina, vice president of EV commercialization at the company, said GM expects to have "1 million units of EV capacity" in North America by 2025. Unlike other automakers, GM hasn't released an EV with "vehicle-to-load" capabilities yet, but Spina said it's looking to fix this soon via an over-the-air software update. making plans.
"We are on the verge of turning our EV into a power source for our customers," Spina said. "And these customers are not even aware of it."
This summer, GM will test bi-directional charging technology at PG&E's lab in Northern California, as well as a "software-defined communication protocol" that automatically connects a charged EV to a person's home when power fails. will be able to flow through. Later, GM and PG&E will identify a select group of customers in California to test these technologies in their homes, aiming to begin extensive customer testing by the end of the year.
"Imagine a future in which every garage has an EV that acts as a backup power source when needed," Spina said.
Much still remains to be determined, such as how GM will convert power from EV batteries from direct current to alternating current. Spina said the company has not yet determined whether the process will take place in the vehicle itself or through some other device such as a wall-mounted charger.
The potential, said Spina, is to transition from dirty, gas-powered generators to something cleaner and more useful. Spina said the average California home uses about 20 kilowatt-hours of electricity a day, while the Chevy Bolt has a 60kWh capacity battery. He said this translates to at least two or three days' worth of electricity for a house.
Other possibilities include using a wider swath of EVs to "smooth down" the grid during times of peak demand, like the summer heat. In those scenarios, Spina said he can envision some sort of payment of "customer benefit" to EV owners who are using their vehicles to feed electricity back into the grid.
PG&E, which is based in San Francisco, serves an area that is a fertile testing ground for vehicle-to-grid technology. It is already home to over 320,000 electric vehicles. Utility-wise, this accounts for about 20 percent of all electric cars in America. By 2030, 5 million EVs are expected to be on the road in California. (Last year, California became the first state to ban future sales of internal combustion engines.)
With enough EVs connected to the grid, they can become sizable "virtual power plants". These are basically just networks of connected batteries that utilities might be able to call up en masse when they need more juice. Interconnected residential solar power systems can also serve the same purpose. The hope is that working together, all these batteries can reduce the stress on the grid whenever there is extreme demand. Virtual power plants could replace polluting, fossil-fueled "drink plants" that utilities have historically relied on when being low on energy.