These Companies Want to Tap the Power From Idle EVs
(Bloomberg) -- For the past few years, charging networks, delivery fleets and retail hubs have been hustling to add infrastructure to provide juice to electric cars. The next step: helping drivers sell excess electrons back to the grid.
ChargePoint Holdings Inc., a Silicon Valley-based company that operates roughly 35,000 fast-charging ports in the US, announced on Thursday a new kind of station that will pump power to and from vehicles, as opposed to the vast majority of chargers, which simply take electrons from the grid.
ChargePoint hopes the system will win business from companies that operate large fleets of vehicles by providing the opportunity to sell the electrons sitting in idle cars and trucks.
“We’ll start to be able to go to electric fleets and reduce the cost straight up — no incentives, no tax breaks, no grants — versus a [gas-powered] fleet,” said CEO Rick Wilmer.
Charging networks have long angled to serve vehicle fleets, such as delivery companies, rideshare outfits and construction contractors, that typically have a large and predictable power demand. ChargePoint reckons the next phase of charging competition will be helping those companies monetize their vehicles. When the vehicles are idle and have extra electrons, they can uncork a tiny trickle of revenue, or at least help power nearby buildings. Often, these fleets are idle at the end of a work day, precisely when power demand is peaking on the typical grid.
“You’re ending up with a significantly better mousetrap,” Wilmer said.
At the same time, there’s a push among many companies to generate and store electricity onsite to safeguard against outages, arbitrage time-of-use power prices or get off the grid entirely. Those sites will now be able to tap into vehicles as part of their energy mix, according to Eaton Corp., a power management company that is partnering with ChargePoint on the new charging system. The stations, which ChargePoint has dubbed Express Grid, will also use electricity generated onsite, say from solar panels or wind turbines.
Companies are “adding distributed energy resources such as solar, storage and wind,” said Paul Ryan, vice president and general manager of energy transition at Eaton. “Now you have EVs that are battery assets.”
To be sure, not all utilities can or will accept electricity from anything that isn’t a power plant. Likewise, many of today’s EVs can only accept electrons, not feed them the other way, a process known as bi-directional charging. For example, Ford Motor Co.’s electric pick-up truck, the F-150 Lightning, can discharge its battery, but the company’s electric crossover, the Mustang Mach-E, doesn’t have that capability.
But many analysts expect so-called bidirectional charging will soon be ubiquitous in the EV market. And with more volatile weather and the rise of power-hungry data centers, US utilities are scrambling to get electricity wherever they can find it.
While ChargePoint and Eaton unveiled their new charging system on Thursday, they have yet to take orders. The companies expect to install the first such unit in the second half of next year.
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