PG&E Corp. Chief Executive Officer Patti Poppe has an unconventional idea for California’s fragile power grid as climate-related disasters, wildfires and heat waves further strain it. She envisions a future where electric vehicles come to the rescue, feeding excess power back during peak demand to stave off blackouts.
PG&E, California’s largest utility, is pushing General Motors Co. to expand on a pilot program from last year and install bi-directional charging software across its current fleet of electric vehicles. Meanwhile, Ford Motor Co. has been promoting its mighty F-150 Lightning electric truck as a backup power source on wheels, capable of re-energizing homes during an outage, and Tesla Inc. has plans to introduce two-way charging in its models in the coming years.
Referred to as “vehicle to grid,” two-way charging works by sending power to the grid from an electric vehicle’s battery while the car is parked and plugged in. Though promising, the technology remains in its nascent stages and comes with significant costs, which has partly stalled its widespread adoption.
In PG&E’s service area alone, which spans from Northern California to the Central Valley, Poppe said there are enough electric vehicles on the road to return roughly 9,000 megawatts of power to the grid — nearly the equivalent of five Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plants.
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