Your EV battery can now power your home, yes really. - The Washington Post

Will this help the climate?

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The idea is companies like Sunrun, along with utilities, will recruit vehicles like the F-150 Lightning to form virtual power plants. These networks of thousands or millions of devices can supply electricity during critical times. By 2030, according to the clean energy nonprofit RMI, this could reduce peak loads in the United States by 60 gigawatts, equivalent to the average consumption of 50 million households. That would cut the number of power plants we need to build, and help redistribute clean energy throughout the day.

Here’s why. Think of today’s electricity grid as a very expensive highway system with dozens of lanes crisscrossing the nation. Yet it’s only at full capacity a few times a year. Because utilities must always keep the lights on, they invest billions of dollars in (polluting) power plants that may only operate for a few hours or even a few minutes each year. As the share of renewable energy increases, utilities may need even more of these plants to smooth out fluctuations when the wind or sun isn’t available.

Batteries offer an alternative. By storing energy and dispatching it at the right time, they can help utilities ramp up renewables without expensive new natural gas plants as a backup.

Still, using an EV as a home battery might not be the best way to cut your overall emissions, especially if you buy an oversize one. (The new Hummer EV, for example, pollutes more per mile than small gas-powered sedans).

The most effective way to zero out emissions, researchers argue, is reducing personal dependence on cars. Mass transit, cycling, walkability, better zoning and land use planning are all necessary to hit emission reduction targets in the transportation sector, which is now the largest source of U.S. emissions, even as EVs replace their fossil fuel counterparts.

But cities won’t develop walkable designs and ubiquitous transit systems overnight — if they ever do. America was built for cars: 93 percent of U.S. households own a vehicle.

So if you aren’t getting rid of your vehicle, you’ll face new choices the next time you walk into a car dealership: How do you want to power your home and the grid?

Many of the EVs rolling off assembly lines today will give you that option, says Douglas Alfaro of WallBox, an EV charging and energy management company. The company is partnering with automakers to design hardware that works with almost any vehicle — Ford’s charging infrastructure, so far, is proprietary. This is already starting to happen: Makers of the Hyundai Ioniq 5, Lucid Air, Kia EV6, VW’s ID.4, Mitsubishi Outlander, and Chevy Silverado EV have announced they will offer home electricity services in the next year or so.

As Graham realized after his last power outage in New Mexico, electrifying your life means rethinking how your vehicle is connected to everything else. In the future, our cars will be plugged into our homes and other intelligent devices, trading electricity with each other and the outside world.

correction

A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to a device as an 80-watt bidirectional charger. It is an 80-amp bidirectional charger. The article has been corrected.