General Motors wants your electric vehicle to power your home someday. While other automakers already sell EVs in some markets with this capability — most notably, Japanese companies with their domestic offerings — it’s still new technology here in the U.S. Ford is highlighting ways the upcoming F-150 Lightning electric truck can power a work or camp site, or your home via its new Sunrun charger backup power capability. GM is thinking along those same lines.
GM announced today it will work with California utility company PG&E on a pilot project that will test cutting-edge bidirectional charging technology in some of the automaker’s EVs. The first mission for this pilot project is to get the EVs to provide power to a home during an emergency, either during the kinds of rolling blackouts that California last saw in 2020 or multi-day affairs when things get really bad. Further down the line, the plan is to find a way to get EVs to help stabilize the grid when there’s high demand.
“We’re on the cusp of turning our EVs into a power source for our customers, and these customers aren’t even aware of it,” said Rick Spina, vice president of EV infrastructure at GM, during a media briefing about the project. “GM and PG&E are collaborating on a pilot to use our EVs as on-demand power sources for homes in PG&E’s service area, one of the first major pilots of this technology to happen, and it’s designed so that we can scale it significantly.”
GM said it will start testing its first EVs with vehicle-to-home capability, along with compatible home chargers with a transfer switch that can accept the current, by this summer. GM isn’t yet saying which company — or companies — it is working with to install the bidirectional hardware, but it did say that the project will involve “multiple GM EVs.” In fact, down the road, Spina said GM plans to build all of its EVs with this kind of bi-directional energy flow components. Aside from the hardware challenges, GM and PG&E will need to develop software-defined communications protocols to make sure the power is all flowing where it needs to go.
There are three main phases in the initial plan. First, GM and PG&E will test the system in the lab. Then, a small group of PG&E customers will be able to test the vehicle-to-home interconnection at their own homes, with PG&E initiating controlled power outages to their homes when the car is connected. Finally, a larger test group is expected to join the customer trials by the end of 2022.
Aaron August, PG&E’s vice president of business development and customer engagement, said that while this new project will only involve GM vehicles, the utility would like to work with other automakers on similar projects as well. That way, when the power grid goes down, more people would theoretically be unaffected in the short term.
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Source: www.autoblog.com