Start of Something Big? EVs Powering Homes, Grid in Maryland

People have been talking about the potential for EVs to be flexible, rolling batteries that can power homes during blackouts, but also become part of the larger grid on a daily, even hourly basis, when plugged in. (explainer above)
Important trial going on in Maryland.

Complete game changer if successful.

Canary Media:

For the first time ever, electric Ford F-150 drivers are getting paid to run their homes from their pickup truck batteries during peak hours to help meet grid demand. And the pathbreaking program is happening in Baltimore, a city better known for the creation of Old Bay seasoning and ​“The Star-Spangled Banner” than transformative grid policies.

When it rolled out the F-150 Lightning in 2021, Ford made a splash by designing a backup power mode: If the owner’s house loses power from the grid, the capacious truck battery can run the house instead. That’s a clean and quiet alternative to a fossil-fueled generator, but it hinted at something far more potent: What if you could put that battery to work all the time, for the benefit of not just the driver but the entire electricity system?

A lot of utilities are talking about this. California’s PG&E, for instance, is looking to enroll up to 1,000 customers in a similar residential pilot program, which it describes as 0 percent subscribed at this time. Other utilities have started programs internally, for employees or their families.

But Baltimore Gas and Electric, the local subsidiary of mega-utility Exelon, appears to be the first provider to actually enroll and pay customers for sending their EV batteries’ stored energy into their homes.

If this concept — known to wonks as vehicle-to-home (V2H), or vehicle-to-grid (V2G) when the power flows beyond the household — grows from its current footprint in Baltimore, it could galvanize the broader transition to low-carbon electric driving. First, it could provide compensation that defrays the cost of owning an electric vehicle, which largely remains a luxury purchase in the U.S. Second, intelligent use of these batteries can turn the arrival of masses of electric vehicles from a grid problem into a grid resource.

If millions of EV drivers plug in to charge at the exact times when the grid is most taxed, that could cause serious issues for power supply and reliability. But if EVs can be managed in a way that encourages charging at times when electricity is cheap and overabundant, and then programs like BGE’s shift some of that power to peak hours, the growing EV fleet could help avoid grid instability, said Kristy Fleischmann Groncki, senior manager of smart grid and innovation at BGE.

“As EV adoption continues in our state, we really need a plan for that increased load on our system,” Fleischmann Groncki told Canary Media. ​“If we’re able to bring that peak down by utilizing customer EVs to offset their houses from grid demand, that will help smooth this out overall.”

It wouldn’t take much to make a real impact this way. Sunrun’s Head of Grid Services Chris Rauscher pointed out that the U.S. has nearly 4 million EVs on the road today. If they all were configured to discharge an easy 5 kilowatts to the grid for a given period, that would add 20 million kilowatts onto the wires, or 20,000 megawatts. That’s roughly twice the capacity of all the grid batteries California built over the last decade. That kind of a swing resource could put an end to blackouts from electricity shortfalls during extreme heat waves, like California experienced in 2020.

“The impact of this resource is going to be enormous,” Rauscher said. ​“You’ll see this become ubiquitous.”