General Motors (GM) and Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) announced Tuesday they would collaborate on a pilot program to use GM electric vehicles (EVs) as on-demand backup power sources for homes in PG&E’s service area.
The pilot program will use cutting-edge bidirectional charging technology to allow EVs to power properly equipped hones. EVs can play a critical role in achieving California’s goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The companies said this bidirectional charging technology allows EVs to benefit area energy customers.
“GM’s collaboration with PG&E further expands our electrification strategy, demonstrating our EVs as reliable mobile sources of power. Our teams are working to rapidly scale this pilot and bring bidirectional charging technology to our customers,” said GM Chair and CEO Mary Barra.
GM said by the end of 2025, the company would have more than 1 million units of EVs in North America to respond to growing demand. The company’s Ultium Platform, EV Architecture combined with the propulsion system, enables EVs at scale for every lifestyle and price point.
The two companies said they hope to test the pilot program by the summer of 2022. The program will include bidirectional hardware and multiple GM EVs, coupled with software-defined communications protocols. Combined, those will enable power to flow from a charged EV to a customer’s home while automatically coordinating between the EV, home, and PG&E’s electric supply.
After the lab testing, the two companies said they plan to test vehicle-to-home interconnection by allowing a small subset of customers’ homes to receive power from the EV when power stops flowing from the electric grid. The companies said they hope to develop a user-friendly vehicle-to-home customer experience for the new technology through the field demonstration. They hope to open larger customer trials by the end of 2022.