Pilot projects across the United States are exploring how electric vehicles could help power grids adjust to rising demand.
State and local governments, schools, utilities, and companies are showing widespread interest in bidirectional charging technology, underlining its development from being cast as a “wild idea” to a critical tool for addressing power demand and climate change, writes Microgrid Knowledge.
The technology transforms EVs from being power consumers to power sources, enabling their batteries to feed electricity back to the grid during times of high demand. They act as a decentralized energy storage system without the added infrastructure of a conventional battery energy storage system project (BESS).
The technology is already being offered in some popular EV models like the Ford F-150 Lightning. In California, a law signed last year could help push bidirectional charging forward by requiring certain classes of EVs to come equipped with it, though some experts say regulations and incentives need to be in place for the law to have its intended effect, Microgrid Knowledge writes.
California embarked on a bidirectional charging pilot project in 2022, but several other locations are still researching how to coordinate chargers and vehicles to support the grid effectively at scale. Massachusetts is launching one of the largest pilots in the U.S., reports Electrek. Expected to unfold over two years, it will deploy 100 bidirectional chargers to homes, school buses, and municipal and commercial fleets across the state for an estimated 1.5 megawatts of new storage capacity.
In Illinois, the state’s largest utility Commonwealth Edison (ComEd) is investigating how to use bidirectional charging for electric school buses to serve as energy storage in the summer, when school is out of session. Canary Media reports that ComEd is partnering with Nuvve, a company based in San Diego, to launch a project this spring with four buses across three school districts in Northern Illinois.
Nuvve also has deals to deploy bidirectional chargers in California and New Mexico, and is working with automakers like BMW, Ford, and GM.
The projects will help to sort through some lingering issues for using bidirectional chargers. On the regulatory side of things, Nuvve is seeking ways to be compensated for the carbon emissions avoided through its technology. And ComEd is working on technical issues—like identifying which technology to use for communicating with chargers and how to use buses for frequency regulation to keep the grid stable, as Nuvve has already done in Denmark, Microgrid Knowledge writes.
“It takes a lot of effort to do those communications properly,” Greggory Kresge, senior manager for utility engagement and transportation electrification at the World Resources Institute, told Canary Media.
“You have communication about speed, power level, how many kilowatts, how fast, what’s the duration—all these different packets of information going back and forth. It’s a fragile ecosystem. If one of those communication links breaks, it doesn’t function.”
