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PG&E and GM to collaborate on vehicle-to-home pilot for EVs

Pacific Gas and Electric Company and General Motors are collaborating to pilot the use of GM electric vehicles as on-demand power sources for homes in PG&E’s service area. G&E and GM will test vehicles with bidirectional charging technology that can help safely power the essential needs of a properly equipped home.

magine a future where everyone is driving an electric vehicle—and where that EV serves as a backup power option at home and more broadly as a resource for the grid. Not only is this a huge advancement for electric reliability and climate resiliency, it’s yet another advantage of clean-powered EVs, which are so important in our collective battle against climate change.

—PG&E Corporation CEO Patti Poppe

By the end of 2025, GM will have more than 1 million units of EV capacity in North America to respond to growing demand.

GM’s collaboration with PG&E further expands our electrification strategy, demonstrating our EVs as reliable mobile sources of power. Our teams are working to rapidly scale this pilot and bring bidirectional charging technology to our customers.

—GM Chair and CEO Mary Barra

PG&E and GM aim to test the pilot’s first vehicle-to-home capable EV and charger by summer 2022. The pilot will include the use of bidirectional hardware coupled with software-defined communications protocols that will enable power to flow from a charged EV into a customer’s home, automatically coordinating between the EV, home and PG&E’s electric supply. The pilot will include multiple GM EVs.

Following lab testing, PG&E and GM plan to test vehicle-to-home interconnection allowing a small subset of customers’ homes to safely receive power from the EV when power stops flowing from the electric grid. Through this field demonstration, PG&E and GM aim to develop a user-friendly vehicle-to-home customer experience for this new technology. Both teams are working quickly to scale the pilot with the goal of opening larger customer trials by the end of 2022.

Pacific Gas and Electric Company, a subsidiary of PG&E Corporation, is a combined natural gas and electric utility serving more than 16 million people across 70,000 square miles in Northern and Central California.

Comments

mahonj

It really depends on the depth of discharge they are talking about and how often they expect to do this per year.
If they took "the middle" 30% once a month it might not be too bad.
Depends on what the EV owners get in return.
If you had a million EVs, and could get 10 kW for 2 hours from each of them, or offset the same amount of demand, you could save quite a bit of peaker usage.
I can see how it benefits the utility certainly.

Lad

This has been considered and discussed before; the main argument against implementation is the wear and tear on one's traction battery. Perhaps traction batteries will evolve into a more robust and less expensive device in time which will open the idea up to a more practical use of BEVs as a resource for utility usage.
It's interesting to note that P.G.&E is collaborating with GM on sharing homeowner BEV power; but, is currently lobbying against solar buybacks from homeowners. One wonders, doesn't one?

SJC

The utility has turned off power during windy conditions to prevent fires

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