HUNDREDS OF CHARGING stations for electric vehicles dot Utrecht’s urban landscape in the Netherlands like little electric mushrooms. Unlike those you may have grown accustomed to seeing, many of these stations don’t just charge electric cars—they can also send power from vehicle batteries to the local utility grid for use by homes and businesses.
Debates over the feasibility and value of such vehicle-to-grid technology go back decades. Those arguments are not yet settled. But big automakers like Volkswagen, Nissan, and Hyundai have moved to produce the kinds of cars that can use such bidirectional chargers—alongside similar vehicle-to-home technology, whereby your car can power your house, say, during a blackout, as promoted by Ford with its new F-150 Lightning. Given the rapid uptake of electric vehicles, many people are thinking hard about how to make the best use of all that rolling battery power.
In recent years, there’s been an uptick in these pilot projects across Europe and the United States, as well as in China, Japan, and South Korea. In the United Kingdom, experiments are now taking place in suburban homes, using outside wall-mounted chargers metered to give credit to vehicle owners on their utility bills in exchange for uploading battery juice during peak hours. Other trials include commercial auto fleets, a set of utility vans in Copenhagen, two electric school buses in Illinois, and five in New York.
These pilot programs have remained just that, though—pilots.
