Pacific Gas and Electric and General Motors announced a groundbreaking collaboration to pilot the use of GM electric vehicles as a home's on-demand power source in the PG&E service area. PG&E and GM will test vehicles with cutting-edge two-way charging technology that can help safely meet the basic needs of well-equipped homes. Electric vehicles play a key role in meeting California's goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and are already providing customers with many benefits. The bidirectional charging function further adds value by improving power resilience and reliability.
"We are very excited about this innovative collaboration with GM. Imagine a future where everyone is driving an electric car — an electric vehicle as a backup power source for the home, and more broadly as a resource for the grid. This is not only a huge advance in power reliability and climate resilience, but also another advantage of clean-powered electric vehicles, which is very important in our collective fight against climate change," said Patti Poppe, CEO of PG&E Corporation.
By the end of 2025, GM will have more than 1 million electric vehicles in North America to meet growing demand. The company's Ultium platform is a platform that combines eviction architecture and propulsion systems to deliver large-scale EV applications for a variety of lifestyles.
"GM's partnership with PG&E further expands our electrification strategy and proves that our electric vehicles are reliable power banks. Our team is working to rapidly scale up this pilot and bring two-way charging technology to our customers," said Mary Barra, Chairman and CEO of GM.
PG&E and GM aim to test the pilot's first car-to-home-enabled EV and chargers by the summer of 2022. The pilot will include the use of bidirectional hardware as well as software-defined communication protocols that will bring electricity from charged EVs into customers' homes, automatically coordinating evictions, home, and PG&E power supplies. The pilot will include multiple GM electric vehicles.
After lab testing, PG&E and GM plan to test vehicle-to-home interconnects, allowing a small percentage of customer homes to safely receive electricity from EVs when electricity stops flowing out of the grid. With this live demonstration, PG&E and GM aim to develop a user-friendly car-to-home customer experience for this new technology. Both teams are rapidly scaling up the pilot, with the goal of conducting a larger customer trial by the end of 2022.