Dive Brief:
- An affordable plug-in connector developed by Ford and Global Power Products will allow compatible Ford pickup truck owners to tap their vehicles for up to five days of home backup power without costly retrofits, the companies said today.
- The Ford Vehicle Connector links Ford F-150 Lightning and PowerBoost Hybrid trucks’ 240-volt outlets with GPP’s GenerLink meter collar device. It can deliver power to home outlets and hardwired appliances like well and sump pumps, security systems, gas furnaces and lighting that can’t be powered with generator extension cords, Ford and GPP say.
- Nic Saeger, CEO of Global Power Products, told Utility Dive that the product greatly simplifies and reduces the cost of home backup for rural utility customers, who typically face longer outages and have more critical hardwired appliances, like well and sump pumps. Rural customers in most of the U.S. experience longer and more frequent power outages, according to an analysis of Poweroutage.us data.
Dive Insight:
Ford says homeowners can expect to spend $1,350 to $1,550 on the new home backup solution, with some wiggle room to allow for variable installation costs. The hardware component — including the GenerLink meter collar, 20-foot GenerLok extension cord and 12-inch Ford Vehicle Connector — costs about $1,100, while professional installation of the meter collar typically costs $250 to $450, the automaker said in a Wednesday blog post.
More than 800 utilities have approved the GenerLink collar for use on their meters, Saeger said. The list includes investor-owned utilities like Commonwealth Edison and Central Maine Power as well as larger municipal utilities like Austin Energy, which serves parts of Texas’s capital region, he said.
It also includes hundreds of smaller rural electric co-ops and other public power entities in far-flung territories where reliability is a perennial challenge and many customers lack municipal water service, Saeger said. Some of those utilities may offer free or discounted meter collar installations, he added.
“If you’re on well water and you don’t have a device like this, you can’t plug in your well [pump],” he said. “You can’t flush your toilet if you don’t have power.”
Customers of utilities that haven’t yet approved the meter collar can connect their trucks to a secondary meter box next to the main meter, Saeger said. But that’s a more expensive option, running about $1,000 more on average after installation, Ford estimates.
Both options are more affordable for Ford truck owners than the status quo, a cumbersome setup that David McCreadie, Ford’s director of EV grid energy services, told Utility Dive can cost upwards of $10,000 per installation. Standby generators, too, can cost anywhere from $7,000 to $15,000, depending on sizing, location and other factors, according to Poweroutage.us.
McCreadie said Ford’s partnership with GPP will benefit existing Ford truck owners and could boost uptake of its electrified vehicle models on the margins.
“People who have never bought an electrified vehicle before may not realize that these products go beyond … just transportation [and] can add real value to the other areas of your life that an internal-combustion vehicle could never think of doing,” he said. “That is something we are trying to incorporate as part of our product messaging.”
McCreadie declined to say whether the smaller, more affordable all-electric pickup Ford plans to begin selling in 2027 will have the same vehicle-to-load capabilities as the F-150 Lightning and PowerBoost Hybrid trucks.
Ford discontinued its all-electric full-size F-150 Lightning pickup in December after a string of disappointing sales years, choosing to shift some battery manufacturing capacity to stationary energy storage. The Lightning will reappear as an extended-range plug-in hybrid.
