Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: August 22, 2024
Vehicle-to-grid capability is now a thing!
America’s first-ever vehicle-to-grid pilot project just kicked off in Baltimore, Maryland, paying EV owners to store power in their batteries and feed it back to the grid when needed.
Tell your state leaders to explore vehicle-to-grid projects!
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“Vehicle to grid” (V2G) and “vehicle to home” (V2H) concepts have gathered a lot of interest in recent years, as people started to realize that since EVs have their own batteries, they could potentially charge up when power when abundant and feed power back to a home or the grid when extra power was needed. Essentially, EV batteries could be a distributed system to displace power in time, an example of a “virtual power plant.”
Now, the local utility in Baltimore, Maryland has quietly made it happen for real. For the first time ever, EV owners (in this case electric Ford F-150 owners) are getting paid to run their homes off their trucks’ capacious batteries during summer weeknights when electricity demand for cooling is high, having previously charge up their trucks during periods when power is abundant.
“Brian Foreman of Howard County, Maryland, became the first person in the country to earn money from his utility by running his home on energy from his F-150 Lightning during summer evening hours.”
-Canary Media
Even at the pilot stage where the details are still being worked out, it seems to have been surprisingly simple to set up. Electric Ford F-150 owners just need a two-way charger, and when they plug in their trucks, they’re set automatically charge up during the day and discharge power back to the home and grid between 5 PM and 9 PM when electricity demand is high. Pilot adopters’ payments are currently ranging from $400 to $1000 per month, and the vehicle-to-grid systems are functioning well even during record heat.
“It’s amazing how well it works; it’ll just switch over and start running the house.”
-Brian Foreman.
This is very early days, with only a handful of people able to participate because the Ford F-150 Lightning is one of only a few EV models designed with vehicle-to-grid capability in mind (so far). And it took a while to set up, with state regulators taking over a year to approve the pilot program. But the potential is incredible: if all 4 million U.S. EVs currently on the road were configured for vehicle-to-grid, it would add a whopping 20,000 megawatts of flexible electricity-storing “swing” capacity, a critical help to prevent blackouts during extreme weather events. Interest is growing, with a California utility starting up a similar program and Maryland passing a law to incentivize this work.
Let’s help get the ball rolling by telling our state-level policymakers about this and encouraging them to start exploring pilot programs with local utilities!
Tell your state leaders to explore vehicle-to-grid projects!
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What a great idea !!
I’m glad they started quietly !