GM Energy Targets Outage-Prone Communities for its Bidirectional EV Marketing, Offering Mobile Microgrids

GM Energy is focusing on selling its bidirectional electric vehicles (EV) in outage-prone communities-especially Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) territory– where its EVs can serve as mobile microgrids that help customers ride through blackouts and potentially provide grid services with vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology.

The states GM Energy is targeting include California, Michigan, Texas, Florida, Washington and New York, said Aseem Kapur, chief revenue officer at GM Energy.

Eight EVs with bidirectional capabilities are now available from GM and its brands, and GM Energy is emphasizing the potential for buyers to lower the costs of EVs by stacking incentives available in certain states.

With GM Energy’s vehicle-to-home system, customers can add stationary storage offered by the company, creating a microgrid, Kapur said. The energy storage systems range in size from 10.6 kWh to 35.4 kWh, Kapur said.

It’s also possible to add solar to the systems. GM Energy doesn’t offer the solar directly, but partners with installers to provide it, he said.

Along with PG&E, GM Energy is participating in pilots with DTE Energy in Michigan and Southern California Edison to test bidirectional technology.

Experimental real-time rates for PG&E pilot participants

For the recently announced PG&E pilot, the utility has rolled out experimental real-time rates in an effort to understand how best to incentivize and compensate EV owners for providing grid services, said Lydia Krefta, director, clean energy transportation at PG&E, which aims to have 3 million EVs on its system by 2030 that provide 550 MW of flexible load.

“The interesting part is figuring out compensation mechanisms,” Krefta said. “We want to share the value of bidirectional charging with customers.”

PG&E incentives available for stacking

Right now, PG&E has the best incentives available for stacking, Kapur said.

Incentives can lower the cost of GM’s vehicle-to-home offering–which allows EVs to be bidirectional and provide backup power to homes–and costs $6,799, PG&E’s Krefta said.

PG&E customers can receive incentives:

• Through the vehicle-to-everything pilot with GM Energy, under which they can receive up to $4,500 in incentives off the price of qualifying GM Energy home products that allow for bidirectional charging. The base incentive for participating in the pilot program is $2,500. Customers in disadvantaged communities are eligible for an extra $500, and those who are among the first 250 customers to sign up get an additional $1,500. Participants in the pilot may also be eligible for incentives by taking part in backup power events and staying in the pilot until it ends.
• Through California’s emergency load reduction program, under which they receive incentives for reducing energy consumption or increasing electricity supply during electrical grid emergencies.
• Through California’s self-generation incentive program, which provides incentives that support the deployment of distributed energy resources.

New York and Massachusetts are attractive markets for GM Energy because they offer storage incentives. Texas, Florida and Washington have solar and EV incentives, Kapur said.

GM Energy is also partnering with Tesla, EVgo and Pilot and Flying J travel centers to make it easier to access fast charging when drivers are on the road.

Testing whether bidirectional charging can drive down customer costs

PG&E’s pilot program with GM Energy aims to test different use cases and understand the value EVs bring to the grid, Krefta said. It’s also testing how bidirectional charging can drive down all customers’ costs with V2G technology.

In the utility’s pilot program, participants choose their own energy management provider. This provider would help decide when to charge and discharge vehicles based on pricing. Participants can do the management themselves or pick a third party.

For PG&E, one of the goals of the pilot is to understand how to work with different energy management providers at scale.

Aggregators and automakers will work in the background to optimize the EV driver’s schedule based on PG&E’s day-ahead pricing, Krefta said.

PG&E is studying whether customers will charge at different times of the day if real-time rates are offered. This could possibly reduce the potential for having many customers charge at once. Under time-of-use rates, PG&E often has a surge in demand when a lower time-of-use rate goes into effect during off-peak hours.

Bidirectional EVs may possibly participate in peak time events–during hot September days–to lower demand at these times, Krefta said.

More bidirectional chargers need to be available

Through its pilots, PG&E is learning that for its customers, finding chargers is a challenge.

“We still have a long way to go in terms of bidirectional charger availability,” Krefta said. “There are so many different boxes of equipment needed to do bidirectional technology. Technology improvements that consolidate equipment might drive incremental costs down.”

With a number of car manufacturers partnering with utilities to test out V2G, the auto and energy industries are seeing increased movement toward having more bidirectional EVs on the road, potentially providing important resources to the grid and helping meet electricity demand and climate goals.