Two-way charging may soon be required on electric vehicles due to the new CA law

It’s an exciting week for grid resiliency enthusiasts in California, as Gov. Gavin Newsom followed through on his previous Smart Grid law and signed another bill this week that could mandate two-way charging for electric vehicles in the future — though the law doesn’t it has a strict timetable attached, so it may be a while before we see this happen.

Bi-directional charging refers to the ability of electric vehicles to not only take electricity from the grid to charge, but also to exit electricity in various forms, whether it’s vehicle-to-charging (connecting devices, such as the Kia Niro EV’s 1.8kW capacity), vehicle-to-home (such as Ford’s ‘Intelligent Backup Power’ system ) or from the grid-vehicle (as the Nissan Leaf is capable of).

While these applications may seem like a party trick, the widespread use of bi-directional charging could lead to huge benefits for efficiency, grid resilience and enable much greater penetration of renewable power generation.

Most power grids have no problem meeting the normal daily needs of electricity consumers, things become difficult when large peaks occur. Either on a hot day when everyone is using the air conditioner, or on a day when electricity production is reduced for one reason or another, that’s when things get difficult.

And as climate change makes temperatures warmer, California’s grid is often overloaded on the hottest days of the summer, which are becoming more and more frequent. Even worse, fossil gas plants that burn methane are the most polluting form of electricity that California consumes, and they are currently being used at peak times to meet high demand.

One solution to this problem is to add energy storage to the grid, which can be dispatched when needed and replenished when the grid is oversupplying electricity. This helps balance the supply and demand of electricity and makes everything a little more predictable.

That’s why there’s been a push for grid-based storage like Tesla’s megapacks, which are a large source of energy storage that can be shipped quickly.

But there’s another source of grid-connected batteries that’s been right under our noses all along: electric cars.

EVs, which are mostly connected to the internet anyway, could be used as a distributed energy storage device and even called upon to help provide electricity when the grid needs it. We already see this happening with virtual power plants based on stationary storage, but if cars had V2G, cars could theoretically contribute in a similar way – both by saving the grid and perhaps earning their owners some money along the way arbitrage (buying electricity when it is cheap and selling it when it is expensive).

The problem is that not many car manufacturers have included V2G capabilities in their cars and their cars do have, not many manufacturers have made V2G compatible equipment and those that have they have built haven’t seen so many customers who are interested in spending the extra money to upgrade their electrical systems with V2G-enabled equipment.

So there has to be something to start all of this, and California thinks it might have just the thing.

New CA law may require two-way charging…eventually.

The idea began in 2023, when state Sen. Nancy Skinner introduced a bill that would require electric vehicles to have two-way charging by 2027.

As this bill made its way through the legislative process, it was watered down from that ambitious timeline. So the current form of the bill, which is now called SB 59, removed that timetable and instead gave the California Energy Commission (CEC) permission to issue a requirement whenever it sees fit.

The bill directs CEC, the California Air Resources Board and the California Public Utilities Commission to review use cases for bidirectional charging and give them the power to require certain weight classes of electric vehicles to be bidirectional capable if a use case exists convincing.

The state already estimates that integrating EVs into the grid could save $1 billion in costs annually, so there’s certainly a use case there, but the question is the cost and immediacy of getting these vehicles on the grid.

The reason this can’t be done right away is that cars take time to design, and while adding two-way charging to an electric vehicle isn’t the most difficult process, it only becomes truly useful with an entire ecosystem of services around the vehicle.

Even Tesla, which for years presented itself as a technology/energy company and sold power walls, inverters, solar panels and so on, is still gradually rolling out its two-way Powershare feature on its vehicles.

And that ecosystem has been a bit of a hard sell so far. It’s all well and good telling someone they can make $500/year selling power to the grid, but then you have to convince them to buy a more expensive charging unit and keep their car plugged in all the time with someone else managing it . energy storage. Some consumers might reject this, so part of CEC’s job is to wait to pull the trigger until it’s obvious that people are really interested in the end-user use case for V2G – otherwise, it doesn’t make sense to ask for a feature on which no one has. to use.

Taking Electrek

Given all these influences, we wouldn’t expect CA to require bidirectional charging anytime soon. But it still gives the state a powerful trigger to pull if other efforts, such as the recently signed smart grid law, prove insufficient as California works to grow, clean, and it makes the grid more accessible at the same time.

But with law enforcement behind it, it could make V2G less of a parlor trick and more of something that actually makes a difference like we EV geeks have been dreaming of for decades now (true story: Electrek once turned down Margot Robbie for an interview and instead talked to some engineers about V2G for an hour).

So telling manufacturers that California may start mandating two-way charging soon means that those manufacturers will likely start taking V2G more seriously, especially given the size and influence of the CA auto market. Even if CEC not make it a requirement, the threat of eventually becoming one means EV makers will likely start gearing up for it regardless.

There is no point in a single person downloading their car to the network, but when MILLION of cars are involved, you could work to flatten the famous “duck curve,” which describes the imbalance between supply and demand for electricity. We hear a lot about “intermittency” as the wind and solar problem and grid storage as the solution, so being able to turn on gigawatt-hours worth of installed storage capacity right away would certainly help solve that problem. And hopefully this law helps us get a little closer to that potential future.

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