- A new pilot program in Massachusetts will pay electric vehicle owners for supporting the grid.
- They may be able to earn hundreds of dollars depending on the time and the grid’s energy needs.
- Several utility and technology companies have teamed up to make this happen.
Dozens of electric vehicle owners in Massachusetts will start earning money by sharing the energy stored in their EV batteries with the local electricity grid in times of need, Heatmap News reported on Thursday.
For a long time, the idea of EV drivers earning money by sharing battery power sounded cool in theory but hadn’t necessarily materialized. But a growing number of pilot programs across the U.S. have now brought this concept to the real world, helping utilities keep up with surging electricity demand from things like AI data centers and increasingly common extreme heat waves due to climate change.
Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, the state’s economic development division, is funding the program and will install 60 bidirectional charging systems in participants’ homes. While the process sounds simple in theory, it requires specialized equipment installation, including a bidirectional home EV charger and an energy management system to communicate with the grid.
Several companies have teamed up to make this happen, including utilities Eversource and National Grid along with EnergyHub, Sunrun, and The Mobility House, which will provide the software and grid-integration technology. Residents will earn an unspecified sum just for participation to encourage more drivers to sign up, and they will earn up to $275 per kilowatt over the summer for sharing electricity from their EV batteries, per the report.
The list of compatible vehicles is also limited, at least for now. Only owners of the Nissan Leaf, Kia EV9, Polestar 3, Volvo EX90 and the now-discontinued Ford F-150 Lightning will be able to participate, as these EVs already come with vehicle-to-grid support baked in from the factory. A couple of Teslas—the Cybertruck and the Model Y Performance—now come with bidirectional charging capability, but they’re not included. (Heatmap reports that this is because Teslas build their DC-to-AC converter into the vehicle, while other vehicles rely on a wall charger to do that work.)
This isn’t the only program in the country experimenting with vehicle-to-grid power sharing. General Motors is working with Pacific Gas & Electric to connect 52,000 of its EVs to the grid by the end of the decade. And early this year, PG&E and Tesla announced that they would use Cybertrucks for a residential vehicle-to-everything program in California, so customers can seamlessly power homes using their EV batteries during outages and also power the grid during peak consumption periods.
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