Eversource and National Grid have launched a test in Massachusetts of of vehicle-to-grid or V2G charging, which would pay owners of electric vehicles for the right to use some of the energy stored in their cars during high electric demand.
Such programs exist in Europe and China but have been slow to get going in the U.S. They require the car, the charging system and the utility to all have the right technology and for regulators to have approved payment methods to make it worth while.
The small pilot – just 45 cars so far – will be run through Massachusetts’ Connected Solutions program, a demand-response project that pays residential customers to enroll their home batteries so the utility can draw electricity from them during peaks in demand. That’s cheaper than buying electricity from power plants when supplies are right and can make homeowners a little bit of cash.
V2G would do the same but using batteries in cars. Many EVs have large batteries, often much larger than batteries sold as home backup systems, that are being only partly used. Advocates of distributed energy have long pointed to car batteries as an underutilized resource to improve the power grid.
Massachusetts is testing a similar program with electric school buses in the city of Beverly, since they sit unused much of the time and have very large batteries.
Right now, only five consumer vehicles sold in the U.S. can participate in the trial: the Nissan Leaf, the Kia EV9, the Polestar Model 3, the Volvo EX90 and the Ford F-150 Lightning pickup.
