GM Turns On Vehicle-to-Grid Charging for Select Electric Vehicle Owners

GM Energy activated vehicle-to-grid charging for its customers on Tuesday. The system allows compatible GM electric vehicles to supply power to homes during outages and to feed electricity into the regional grid during periods of high demand. The company said owners can charge their vehicles when electricity prices are low and discharge power when prices are high.

Sterling Anderson, the automaker's chief product officer, said at a San Francisco event that the technology can turn every GM electric vehicle into a distributed power resource.

Drivers must purchase a $20,000 system from the four-year-old GM Energy subsidiary and arrange professional installation. They also need their local utility to approve the equipment and create payment programs that compensate owners for grid support.

GM stated that the $20,000 cost is typically recovered after about five years of use. A quarter million GM vehicles already have bidirectional charging hardware, but GM Energy reports only thousands of active customers.

Tuesday's event the subsidiary announced a stress test with 30 GM employees using Michigan's DTE Energy network. It also set a target of placing 52,000 GM electric vehicles on a major Northern California grid by 2030. The company said it has reached agreements with dozens of other utilities. Wade Scheffer, GM Energy's vice president, attributed low adoption to lack of awareness.

Scott Samuelsen, a University of California at Irvine professor who led an earlier vehicle-to-home project, said utilities are only beginning to address the technology two years after initial demonstrations. Clint Stewart, a senior product development manager at Puget Sound Energy, described bidirectional charging as still years from scale.

GM Energy said it is working on software that prevents vehicles from discharging when owners need the remaining range.