Photo: GM
It's an exciting week for grid stalwarts in California, as Governor Gavin Newsom followed through on his previous grid law and signed another law this week that could require double charging for EVs in the future — though the law doesn't have a hard timeline attached, either. it may take some time before we see this happen.
Dual charging describes the ability of electric vehicles to not only take electricity from the grid and charge it, but output electricity in different ways, whether this is charging the car (connecting devices, like the 1.8kW power in the Kia Niro EV), the car to the home (like Ford's “Intelligent Backup Power” system), or to the car -grid (like the Nissan Leaf is able ).
While these applications may seem like a group trick, the widespread use of dual charging could lead to significant gains in efficiency, grid resilience, and allow greater penetration of renewable electricity generation.
Most electricity grids don't really have a problem meeting the normal daily needs of electricity users, it's when the big spikes happen that things get complicated. Whether it's on a hot day when everyone is using the air conditioner, or on a day when electricity production is reduced for some reason or another, that's when things get difficult.
And as climate change makes temperatures hotter, California's grid is often taxed more on hot summer days, which are becoming more frequent. Worse, methane gas peaker plants are the most polluting type of electricity California uses, and these are currently being used at peak times to meet the high demand.
One solution to this problem is to add energy storage to the grid that can be sent when needed, and that can be replenished when the grid overfills. This helps balance the supply and demand of electricity and makes everything more predictable.
That's why there's been a push for grid-based storage like Tesla's megapacks, which represent a major source of rapidly deployable energy storage.
But there's another source of grid-connected batteries out there that's been under our noses all along: electric cars.
EVs, which are mostly connected to the Internet anyway, can be used as a distributed energy storage device, and can also help provide electricity when the grid needs it. We are already seeing this happen with Virtual Power Plants based on static storage, but if cars have V2G, in theory the cars can contribute in the same way – both save the grid, and maybe make their owners some money along the way through arbitrage (buying electricity when it's cheap and selling it when expensive).
The problem is, not many car manufacturers have put V2G capabilities into their cars, and cars at that do have it, there are not many manufacturers who have made devices capable of working with V2G, and those who have be the developer does not see that many customers are interested in spending more money to upgrade their electrical systems with V2G-capable devices.
So there needs to be something to restart all of that, and California thinks it might have that.
New CA rule may require double charging… eventually.
The idea began in 2023 when state Senator Nancy Skinner introduced a bill that would require EVs to be dual-charged by 2027.
As the bill moved through the legislative process, it was reduced to that critical timeline. So the current version of the bill, now called SB 59, removed the timeline and instead gave the California Energy Commission (CEC) permission to issue the requirement whenever it sees fit.
The bill directs the CEC, the California Air Resources Board, and the California Public Utilities Commission to evaluate bidirectional charging use cases and empowers them to require certain weight categories for EVs to be bidirectional if there is a compelling use case.
The state already estimates that connecting EVs to the grid could save $1 billion in costs annually, so there is definitely a use there, but the question is the cost and speed of building those vehicles on the grid.
The reason this isn't happening quickly is that cars take time to design, and while adding dual charging to an EV isn't a very difficult process, it's also really useful with the entire ecosystem of services around the car.
Even Tesla, which has been a tech/energy company for years and sells power walls, inverters, solar panels and more, is slowly pulling its two-way Powershare feature from its cars.
And that ecosystem has been a hard sell until now. It's all well and good to tell someone that they can make $500/year selling power to the grid, but then you have to convince them to buy an expensive charging unit and keep their car plugged in all the time, with someone to handle it. energy conservation. Some buyers might balk at that, so part of CEC's job is to wait to pull the trigger until it shows that people are interested in the end-user use case for V2G – otherwise, there's no point in requiring a feature that no one will use.
Electrek's Take
Given all these influences, we don't expect CA to need double charging anytime soon. But it still gives the state a powerful trigger if other efforts, like the recently signed smart grid law, turn out to be insufficient as California's work, grow, clean, again make its grid more affordable at the same time.
But having the legal force behind it could turn V2G into less of a parlor trick and more of a game-changer that we EV pros have been dreaming of for decades now (true story: Electrek he once turned Margot Robbie down for an interview and instead talked to some engineers about V2G for an hour).
So, telling manufacturers that California could start mandating dual charging soon means that those manufacturers will probably start taking V2G more seriously, especially given the size and influence of the CA auto market. Even if the CEC this is not the case make it a necessity, the threat of it eventually becoming one means EV makers will likely start preparing for it anyway.
There is no real point when a person takes their car off the grid, but when millions of vehicles involved, you may work to minimize the “duck curve,” which describes the imbalance between electricity supply and demand. We hear a lot about “intermittency” as a wind and solar problem, and grid storage as a solution to that, so being able to quickly change the installed gigawatt-hour storage capacity will certainly help solve that problem. And we hope this legislation helps us get a little closer to that possible future.
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