Dive Brief:

• A TXU Energy program that allows Ford electric vehicle owners in Texas to fill up at home without paying energy charges during off-peak hours shifted the vast majority of charging to lower-demand parts of the day, Ford said on April 23.
• In 2025, the TXU Free EV Miles program pushed 94% of enrolled customers’ charging activity between the hours of 10 p.m. and 1 p.m., when congestion and wholesale energy pricing tend to be lower on the Electric Reliability Council of Texas grid.
• Ford said the program shifted 515 MWh of energy to off-peak periods, enough to power about 39 average Texas homes for a year. Enrolled customers receive a $100 prepaid card from Ford at sign-up and $250 each year from TXU Energy as long as they remain in the program, Ford said.

Dive Insight:

TXU’s Free EV Miles program is currently open only to Ford EV drivers, but Texas’s largest retail electric utility has other EV-charging options with free or discounted energy for customers who drive other makes.

Its Free EV Nights program, for example, offers single-family home residents with eligible smart meters charging at no energy cost between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m.

TXU says the Ford program’s 15-hour daily off-peak period is a good fit for drivers without faster Level 2 chargers installed at home. Level 2 chargers can add 20 to more than 50 miles of charge per hour, depending on the vehicle and circuit amperage, but wiring the 240-volt circuit to a garage or parking area can be costly.

In an interview, the CEO of the company providing the grid-to-vehicle “connective tissue” for the TXU program and other managed home-charging initiatives said Ford is a natural partner for retail utilities looking to attract EV drivers.

“Ford has been very interested in investing time and resources in any proposition that will deliver savings for customers,” ChargeScape CEO Joseph Vellone told Utility Dive.

Vellone said Texas’s unusually competitive retail electricity market makes it an “attractive proving ground” for customer-centric demand-management programs. He mentioned Base Power’s battery-enabled retail electricity plans, which provide customers with whole-home backup while delivering grid services, and Tesla Electric’s retail partnership with Sunrun, which bundles home solar, energy storage and EV charging.

EV-oriented programs are especially appealing to retail utilities because EV drivers tend to live in homes with high-load devices like heat pumps and thus “consume more electricity at a baseline,” Vellone said. “Assuming every retailer is making some sort of gross margin on every kilowatt-hour they sell, that is an attractive customer to have.”

Programs like TXU’s are “certainly replicable in any state that has competitive retail,” Vellone added. 

Thirteen states plus the District of Columbia have broadly competitive retail markets, while eight more have “hybrid” markets where some customers can choose a retail provider, according to the Retail Energy Supply Association.

A January report from the Brattle Group suggests consumer programs designed to shape EV load can work even in states without fully competitive retail markets. Brattle tested “active managed charging” strategies on a cohort of 58 drivers in Washington, one of the eight hybrid-market states, and found the potential for significant load shifts that could save utilities more than $200 per vehicle annually.

In February, ChargeScape began a bidirectional charging demonstration with Puget Sound Energy, which serves more than 1 million electric customers in the greater Seattle area. The pilot taps Ford and Kia vehicles for home backup and grid services, PSE said in March.