The batteries inside electric vehicles can do a lot more than power a car.
They can back up homes, schools, and businesses during power outages. They can soak up grid power when it’s plentiful and cheap and send it back when it’s scarce and costly. And they could eventually provide enough reliable power to allow utilities to avoid building more power plants or expanding their grids to meet growing demand for electricity — something that would save money for utility customers as a whole.
So far, utilities have had a hard time turning this dream of batteries on wheels into a reality. Plenty have launched these “vehicle-to-everything” (V2X) pilots, but only with mixed success. Broader adoption has been held back by the cost and complexity of getting the required technologies to work smoothly in the real world — and by an absence of well-established utility programs that pay EV owners enough to make it worth their while.
In Massachusetts, a new V2X pilot project is now seeking households, businesses, schools, nonprofits, and municipal governments to test all of these ways that EVs can help the grid. And unlike many V2X tests done by other U.S. utilities, this one will offer two key financial incentives: bidirectional chargers at no cost to participants, and real money to those who commit to letting utilities tap into their EV battery power.
Over the next nine months, the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, the state’s clean-energy economic development organization, will use most of the pilot’s $6 million in funding to give out up to 100 free bidirectional chargers. This is the technology that allows EV owners to not only pull electrons from the grid but to send power back and get paid for it. Households will get most of this equipment, but a subset of higher-voltage two-way chargers will go to commercial vehicle and electric school bus fleet operators.
Those chargers will be installed by September 2026, said Elijah Sinclair, MassCEC clean transportation program manager. The goal is for the pilot to provide about 1.5 megawatts of distributed energy storage capacity, roughly equivalent to the power use of about 250 homes.
Massachusetts law calls for 900,000 EVs on the road by 2030 in order to meet the state’s decarbonization goals. If a well-designed pilot project unlocks cost-effective ways or even a fraction of those future EV owners to enlist in V2X programs, the payoff could be huge, Sinclair said. EVs tend to stay plugged in far longer than it takes to fully charge up their batteries. Being able to tap into that stored energy expands the value that EVs can provide the grid and allows them to store solar and wind power to use later when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.
“That could be a really important piece as we seek to get to net-zero by 2050,” Sinclair said. “It still requires a whole lot of infrastructure, and it’s complicated for the utilities. But in the future, it could be serving huge loads across the grid.”
The trick is to move from the experiment stage to a safe, simple, and profitable program for a majority of the state’s EV owners, he said. It’s not something any other state or utility has managed to pull off just yet — but MassCEC and its partners are hoping the upcoming pilot will build the foundation to make that happen.
Can vehicle-to-everything programs save money?
The idea of pulling power from EV batteries is far from new. Universities and research organizations have been successfully testing V2X for more than two decades, and U.S. utilities have had pilots up and running for years.
Other countries have more fully embraced the technology. Japanese automakers started enabling EVs to provide backup power via vehicle-to-home and vehicle-to-building charging to deal with the power supply emergencies that followed the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster. In Europe, vehicle-to-grid (V2G) projects have been turning a profit for commercial and government vehicle fleets for years, and more recently for consumer EVs as well.
In the U.S., by contrast, vehicle-to-grid services have largely been successful in just one niche of the EV market: electric school buses, which happen to sit unused during most of the day. In Massachusetts, the company Highland Electric Fleets and the city of Beverly have been doing V2G with school buses since 2020, and have been earning money for delivering extra power to utility grids over the past few summers.
Transit and commercial vehicles, which must be on the road more frequently and have less idle time to charge, are more challenging to make profitable.
Vehicle-to-home backup power, meanwhile, has been built into the Nissan Leaf for more than a decade, and has been a major marketing draw for the Ford F-150 Lightning electric pickup and other new EV models. But actually engineering and installing the systems to turn a home EV charging system into a backup power system for the grid is a bit more complicated — and costly.
So said Kelly Helfrich, who leads the transportation electrification practice at Resource Innovations, a company specializing in clean-energy program implementation that is co-leading the MassCEC V2X program. She’s worked in the EV space for more than a decade, including a stint at General Motors that covered the automaker’s entry into vehicle-to-grid technology and its eventual development of V2G standards.
Bidirectional chargers are more costly and technically difficult to build compared to simple one-way chargers. That investment may well be worth it for school buses, which have big batteries that can earn lots of money while they’re sitting idle. But for everyday households, it’s harder to see a path to recouping the extra $5,000 to $10,000 in up-front costs that bidirectional equipment can bring, Helfrich said.
Installing free chargers for homeowners, as the MassCEC program is doing, “helps take that cost out of the equation,” she said, “to really test vehicle-to-home at a larger scale than we’d be able to if we were to rely on consumers to take on that expense.”
Successful V2X programs also need to make sure participants get paid for taking part.
On that front, Massachusetts already has an established program that lets EV owners earn money by helping the grid, according to Zach Woogen, executive director of the Vehicle-Grid Integration Council, a group representing EV and charging manufacturers that’s working with utilities and regulators across the country.
