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Power goes out, car goes on.
That’s the idea behind vehicle-to-home (V2H) and vehicle-to-grid (V2G), the prospect of using the power in your electric vehicle’s battery pack to run your lights, refrigerator, and charge your phone if there’s a power outage in your neighborhood.
While a home battery, such as Tesla’s Powerwall, supplies electricity for a short time, the bigger battery array in an EV could power essential appliances in a home for days, assuming the home’s occupants were frugal in using it.
V2G is a broader concept: an EV owner can charge the vehicle overnight when power costs less, then send it back into the grid at peak demand times—a 90-degree afternoon in July, for example.
In a case like that, the electric company would pay the vehicle owner for the electricity the car provided.
The vehicle owner makes money and the utility company keeps the current flowing—a win-win.
Now Ford and General Motors are partnering with Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), California’s chief utility, to test and refine V2H and V2G technologies.
The hitch in V2H is to install a switch that disconnects your house from the grid when you’re running your EV as a generator. That protects the utility company’s line workers from shocks while they’re repairing the circuitry out at the road.
V2G is more complicated.
Many utility companies already have grid-scale battery storage wired into their networks. Those companies need ways to “read” the number of vehicles delivering to the grid at a given time in order to balance the need with the available power.
Utilities also will want to prioritize drawing power first from its own batteries so they don’t have to pay EV owners until they have to.
Vermont already is testing this concept of a “virtual power plant” with a network of home-installed Powerwalls that utility company Green Mountain Power can tap as needed.
The tests with PG&E will measure the effects of this two-directional current flow on vehicle batteries’ lifespan and performance and analyze various ways to reward participating drivers without reducing utilities’ return on investment.
TRENDPOST: Most people considering buying an EV haven’t thought much about the prospect of making money with it, especially from their electric company.
However, by the end of this decade, V2H and V2G will be standard elements of car salespeople’s EV pitches. A vehicle’s capacity for those services will be as important a measure of its worth as mileage is in deciding which gas buggy to buy today.