General Motors, which is pivoting to electric vehicles and investing billions into EV development and production, has taken its research and development into an interesting territory: It is testing the use of its electric vehicles as a backup power source for homes.
The automaker has announced a collaboration with US-based natural gas and electric utility company Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) to pilot the use of GM electric vehicles as on-demand power sources for homes.
The idea, dubbed as 'bidirectional charging', would allow EVs to pull power from a house and also supply power back to it, if need be. Teams from both the companies are working to rapidly scale this pilot and take bidirectional charging technology to the customers. The pilot will include multiple GM EVs.
"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 was quoted as saying.
How the pilot will work
"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 carmaker said.
The initial pilot testing will be confined to a small group of chosen customers’ homes. Once they start to safely receive power from the EV when power stops flowing from the electric grid, the project will be scaled up for larger customer trials by the end of 2022.
Though both the companies did not go into any specific details, it is said that power from any standard EV would be able to power a typical home for two days during emergency.
As of now no GM's EV is capable of delivering energy to a home, or another vehicle. But it is said that its upcoming vehicles would be equipped with the requisite technology to supply power back to other sources.
