Dive Brief:
- Massachusetts has begun deploying bidirectional electric vehicle chargers at no cost to select customers, as part of a two-year “vehicle-to-everything” demonstration to explore the potential for residential, municipal and school customers to use EV batteries for backup power, self-consumption and demand response.
- Elijah Sinclair, senior program manager for clean transportation with the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, a state economic development agency, told Utility Dive that the program should have 70 to 80 of the chargers installed by the end of summer. Four municipal entities, five school districts and more than 45 Massachusetts residents are participating, MassCEC says.
- Sinclair said early results from Massachusetts school districts, in particular, show promise for electric buses to support the state’s power grid while generating revenue for their owners. The pilot program will help MassCEC, utilities and other stakeholders understand how both buses and other vehicle types interact with the grid as EV adoption increases in Massachusetts, he said.
Dive Insight:
State- and utility-led bidirectional charging programs, which require specialized charging equipment, are increasingly common across the United States.
Pacific Gas & Electric, a California-based investor-owned utility, offers three bidirectional charging programs. Baltimore Gas & Electric and Sunrun launched a pilot program two years ago in Maryland, around the same time the state passed a law requiring utilities to expedite bidirectional charger installations and allow customer vehicles to participate in virtual power plant programs.
Although not all EVs can discharge power stored in their batteries, the number of vehicle models that can is growing. The consumer vehicles eligible to participate in the Massachusetts pilot include the Ford F-150 Lightning pickup, the Nissan Leaf hatchback, the Kia EV9 and Volvo EX90 family SUVs and the Polestar 3 compact SUV, MassCEC says. Five electric school bus models are eligible as well.
The Massachusetts pilot was among the EV charging initiatives selected by the state’s Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Coordinating Council, or EVICC, to receive some of a $50 million award authorized by the American Rescue Plan, a federal economic stimulus package enacted in 2021.
EVICC’s mandate is to build out “the EV charging network of the future” in Massachusetts, Sinclair said. The lessons from this pilot could help the state overcome ongoing challenges to broad-based bidirectional charging adoption, such as the upfront cost and logistical hurdles, he said.
The aim is to prove out “how we go from ‘lab experiment’ to something anyone can do at home,” Sinclair said.
The state’s ConnectedSolutions virtual power plant is among the country’s most generous VPPs for owners of bidirectional-capable EVs, Sinclair said. Certain enrolled light-duty vehicles have the potential to earn around $3,000 per summer, he said.
“That kind of compensation could be very compelling for residential customers,” he said.
With larger batteries and predictable off-duty periods, particularly during summer demand peaks, Sinclair said, electric school buses could earn significant amounts each year.
For vehicles that participate in National Grid’s ConnectedSolutions program, buses can earn up to $12,000 annually, according to a MassCEC case study. In an earlier vehicle-to-grid demonstration, in Beverly, Massachusetts, over the summers of 2021 and 2022, a single school bus discharged 10.78 MWh into National Grid’s system and generated $23,500 in revenue, MassCEC says.
For school buses, “the use case is already starting to make economic sense” and electric school bus adoption could take off as a result over the next few years, Sinclair said. The state’s utilities, both investor-owned and those operated by municipalities, have taken steps to smooth interconnection of bidirectional-capable chargers, he added.
Utilities are still learning how to manage bidirectional-capable EVs as load management assets, however. At a workshop hosted by MassCEC last week, Sinclair said at least one utility said they were concerned about striking a balance between “[making] sure they get the power they need [while ensuring] the owner of the vehicle also gets use of it” — in other words, that they wouldn’t pull too much energy from vehicles during demand response events.
Sinclair sounded optimistic that utilities would overcome that obstacle. EV batteries are much bigger than standard residential stationary battery systems, so taking even a small portion of their stored energy would be impactful if scaled to cover a meaningful fraction of the roughly five million vehicles on the road in Massachusetts, he said.
