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Federal, state, and local officials, utility and labor representatives and carmakers have agreed to work together to commercialize bidirectional electric cars, large vehicles, and charging stations to support and help decarbonize the grid.

Ensuring the power in EVs and charging infrastructure flows in two directions “can provide energy and services back to the grid, including ancillary services,” plus supply local needs, from homes to microgrids, said Rima Oueid, US Department of Energy commercialization expert in the Office of Technology Transfer. She spoke at a DOE-California Energy Commission sponsored press conference last week held at a labor center in Commerce that provides free electrical training. The City of Commerce has few residents and is largely home to major industries.

The unprecedented new multi-party Memorandum of Understanding seeks to ensure that electric vehicles and chargers include two-way communication technology to control energy flows and help lower the cost of transmission and distribution upgrades and vehicles. The MOU also includes DOE’s national laboratories testing cybersecurity protections and electrician unions training workers in vehicle integration systems.

“The opportunities of a green economy are truly boundless if we foster and welcome innovation,” said Lauren Faber with the City of Los Angeles.

Patty Monahan, California Energy Commission member, considers the electrification of transportation “unstoppable,” pointing to the continued growth of EVs in California, China, and the European Union. She stressed the significant potential benefits of the MOU and its aim to have bidirectional EVs and charger ports be able to fuel everything from the grid to buildings.

Earlier this year, 1 million zero emission vehicles had been sold in California, with EV sales making up 16% of vehicle sales at the end of the first quarter of this year. California seeks to have 7.5 million EVs by 2030, which are supported by 1.2 million chargers. That represents a significant flexible load increase of 16%, which can benefit the grid.

“The challenge is to realize this potential,” Monahan said. That includes putting money back in EV driver pockets for payments from supporting the grid during times of high demand—be it from heatwaves, wildfires, or other causes—and charging the batteries when the grid is flush with resources and demand is low.

Electrifying school buses alone could provide 1 GW to the grid, according to Monahan.

To scale bidirectional technology, technical standards that govern the integration of vehicle-to-grid, or V2G-enabled EVs, need to be incorporated into state interconnection rules, a January Interstate Renewable Energy Council report said.

The California Public Utilities Commission has been slowly pushing vehicle-to-grid developments , first with its Distributed Energy Resources interconnection rulemaking that made way for V2G as stationary storage, as reported by Current last month. Another driver is a bill passed in 2019, which ordered the commission to develop and implement vehicle-grid integration strategies , allowing companies like Nuvve, Fermata Energy , and dcbel to begin optimizing interactions of bidirectional chargers with utility systems. A further major V2G milestone was the CPUC’s authorization of aggregated EVs for its Emergency Load Reduction Program last December.

Looking at the global scale, the International Energy Agency estimates there will be 130 million EVs across the world by the start of the next decade. These vehicles will not only increase electricity demand but “will contain 10 times the amount of energy storage needed by the grid.”

Work is also underway at the local level.

The City of Los Angeles is said to have the most charging stations of any other city. There are 17,000 commercial and publicly available chargers, according to Faber.

LA also is working on a pilot using two bidirectional charging stations, two Nissan LEAF EVs, and a cloud-based software platform for load management and control at the John Ferraro Building. The pilot seeks to answer how EV fleets can lower the duck curve, whether there will be enough charge in the EVs to supply the grid, and be able to recharge for driving.

The CPUC is expected to soon approve Pacific Gas & Electric's three pilots at a cost of nearly $12 million that will use bi-directional vehicles. One would have EV batteries power up to 1,000 homes and another would have medium- and heavy-duty electric trucks charge a commercial building. A third would use the EVs to power a microgrid during outages.

Most charging pilots to date have been unidirectional and discharge over long periods of time, DOE’s Oueid pointed out.

“We have to ignore the old boundaries of you do the wires and I do the wheels,” said LA’s Lauren Faber. That “artificially limits the reach of technology.”