The fact that millions more EVs will be on the road in the coming years has stoked concerns about a US electric grid that is already overtaxed as the climate crisis exacerbates power reliability issues across the country.

But what if EVs could actually make the grid more resilient and reliable?

That’s one of the multibillion-dollar questions shaping the transition away from fossil-fuel-powered vehicles to battery-powered ones. It’s the subject of federal research and investment, pilot programs by utility companies, and interest among stakeholders looking to leverage EVs’ mobile power storage—their batteries—to help shore up an already-stressed grid.

“EVs could be a burden,” Ryan Gallentine, managing director of Advanced Energy United (AEU), a trade group representing the advanced energy industry, told Tech Brew, “or they could be an additive resource, depending on how well we manage it.”

AEU has model policies and regulations it’s pushing to get enacted. The group backed a bill in Maryland, the DRIVE Act, that will require utility companies to support vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technologies.

If millions of vehicles suddenly start plugging into the grid all at once, it could create additional capacity constraints. But industry stakeholders are optimistic about the opportunities around vehicle grid integration, or VGI, which encompasses policies and technologies that enable EV charging to benefit the grid.

“Picture EVs as mobile battery-storage systems. EVs can absorb excess power when available and store that energy for future needs,” Paul Gasper, a battery degradation scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, said in a statement. “There is potential to store renewable energy within the global EV fleet to improve the flexibility and resilience of our power grid.”

Constraint concerns

Electrifying transportation is a key strategy to help reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from an emissions-heavy sector. Per Environmental Protection Agency rules finalized this year, EVs could make up as much as 56% of new light-duty vehicle sales by 2032. Hundreds of thousands of new charging stations are expected to go into the ground to support this transition.

Philip Krein, a faculty member at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the department of electrical and computer engineering, told Tech Brew the grid’s capacity will likely need to double in the coming years to accommodate the electrification of transportation. If that sounds daunting, he pointed to a period from the 1950s until the mid-1970s when the US electric grid’s capacity grew exponentially.

“The notion that in 30 years’ time we have to grow the capacity by a factor of two, I don’t find that very scary,” he said. “It’s not going to happen by itself, and it is something that we have to plan deliberately…but there’s no sky-is-falling kind of thing. The grid can be expanded to meet this need.”

With this movement comes the opportunities opened up by an emerging technology: bidirectional charging, which allows EV drivers to discharge their vehicles’ batteries to power their homes and other buildings, and to send power back to the grid.

As Tech Brew previously reported, consumers are largely in the dark on these possibilities. An Escalent report from earlier this year found that 42% of consumers had never heard of vehicle-to-home (V2H) charging and over half had never heard of V2G.

But bidirectional charging is slated to play a greater role in the clean-energy transition going forward as automakers increasingly add this capability to their EVs.

Tony Posawatz, CEO of vehicle-to-everything solutions provider Fermata Energy, compared the tech to something like Airbnb’s business model: “You have an expensive asset that sits idle. It isn’t used. You want to use it.”

In this case, the asset isn’t an apartment or a house but an EV battery. Posawatz noted that most private vehicles sit idle about 95% of the time—so it makes sense to put an EV’s built-in energy storage to work.

“When the grid needs help, we have a system where we get forecasted signals from the grid,” he explained. “We make available the opportunity for the customer to participate. When we have multiple customers, we can aggregate a lot of this energy and provide that to the grid in support.”

Fermata has tested its products with automakers and utilities and is preparing to start scaling its technology, he said.

“Regardless of more EVs, the grid is being taxed as we speak—data centers, cellular towers, anything associated with processing AI, and the like,” Posawatz said. “This is all consuming a lot more energy. And the grid is having to deal with a lot more load.” But managed effectively, he sees EVs as a “helpful solution” to this conundrum.

Get smart

One strategy to manage this transition is by getting smarter about the ways EVs charge, such as designing programs that incentivize charging during off-peak hours.

But first, utility companies need to actually know where and how many battery-powered vehicles are on the grid. Lauren Randall, VP of policy and market development at Utilidata—a startup using AI for real-time grid management, and is working with Nvidia— said that one of the obstacles potentially holding back VGI is that some utilities may lack the ability to determine an EV plugged into the grid is an EV, or something else, like an air conditioner.

Utilidata provides data to inform charging management policies and programs, she said. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” Randall said. “If you don’t know that that’s an EV, how could you possibly design the right charging program?”

The US Department of Energy is also interested in the ways that AI can help with efforts to modernize the grid and make VGI a reality. In a recent report, the agency identified planning, permitting, operations and reliability, and resilience as areas where AI could help with grid management.

Research suggests that the addition of millions of EVs to electric grids will require major investments by utilities. One 2023 study commissioned by California utility regulators, for example, found that the state’s utilities would need to invest $50 billion in their distribution grids by 2035 to prepare for the expected increase in demand. And, as Canary Media previously reported, Boston Consulting Group found in a 2019 study that the average utility company would need to spend between $1,700 and $5,800 “in grid upgrades per EV through 2030”—a scenario that could lead to rate increases for users.

Still, Randall is optimistic that EVs can benefit the grid in the long run.

“We think even more visibility and ability to communicate with EVs at the grid edge is going to help us really harness their potential as a true grid resource.”

Case studies

In one example of V2G that’s already happening, owners of electric Ford F-150 Lightning trucks in Baltimore are being compensated to power their homes with their vehicles’ batteries during peak demand hours, Canary Media reported.

Baltimore Gas and Electric (BGE) has reportedly used grant funding from the DOE to support the program.

“We know that the power stored in electric vehicles will be essential in our state’s effort to achieve its bold net-zero emissions goals,” Mark Case, VP of regulatory policy and strategy at BGE, said in a press release announcing the program.

“An electrified transportation system can benefit all Americans. Seamless VGI is crucial to achieving this goal and maximizing benefits for electricity system users and EV drivers,” one recent DOE report on EVs and the grid said.

Thinking big

Numerous experts Tech Brew spoke to brought up what they described as one of the more intriguing use cases for bidirectional charging: school buses and other large vehicle fleets. That’s because such vehicles require large batteries, run predictable routes, and have lots of idle time.

One California school district is already doing this by transitioning to a fully electric school-bus fleet for this school year. The fleet will be equipped with V2G capabilities, enabling it to send up to 2.1 gigawatt hours of energy back to the grid annually.

Another strategy to help energy systems adapt to EVs is to introduce more Level 1 and Level 2 charging, which some experts say could help prevent taxing the grid.

Tiya Gordon, co-founder and COO of itselectric, a curbside charging solutions provider, told Tech Brew that while more fast charging is needed, she is a proponent of Level 2 charging. The startup’s model doesn’t require utility cooperation or permits; its chargers connect to nearby buildings, which can benefit from revenue sharing with itselectric.

“I get text alerts on my phone every day from Con Ed that say, ‘Lower your power consumption, turn off your air conditioning,’” Gordon said. “So the idea that we’re going to be able to put in tens of thousands of DC fast chargers that require megawatts of power to run during daytime, when we can’t even basically scale heating and cooling—it’s absurd.”

The startup aims to introduce a curbside V2G solution, which could help address brownouts: “If we’re seeing increased power consumption,” Gordon said, “we can alert drivers that they can push their energy back in and then they can be monetarily compensated for that.”