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It’s an exciting week for grid resiliency-lovers in California, as Governor Gavin Newsom followed up his earlier smart grid law and signed another law this week which may require bidirectional charging on EVs in the future – though the law has no hard timeline attached, so it may be a while before we see this happen.

Bidirectional charging refers to the capability of electric vehicles to not just take electricity from the grid to charge, but to output electricity in various forms, whether this be vehicle-to-load (plugging in devices, like the 1.8kW capability on the Kia Niro EV), vehicle-to-home (like Ford’s “Intelligent Backup Power” system), or vehicle-to-grid (like the Nissan Leaf is capable of).

While these applications may seem like a party trick, widespread use of bidirectional charging could lead to huge benefits for efficiency, grid resiliency, and enable much greater penetration of renewable electricity generation.

Most electric grids don’t really have trouble meeting the regular everyday needs of electricity consumers, it’s when big spikes happen that things get difficult. Either on a hot day when everyone is using air conditioning, or a day when electricity generation is curtailed for some reason or another, that’s when things get difficult.

And as climate change makes temperatures hotter, California’s grid is often overtaxed on the hottest summer days, which are becoming more numerous. Even worse, methane-burning fossil gas peaker plants are the highest-polluting form of electricity California consumes, and these are currently used at peak times in order to deal with high demand.

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

This is why there has been a push for grid-based storage like Tesla megapacks, which represent a large source of rapidly-dispatchable energy storage.

But there’s another source of grid-connected batteries out there which was right under our nose the whole time: 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, theoretically cars could contribute in a similar way – both saving the grid, and perhaps making their owners some money along the way via arbitrage (buying electricity when its cheap and selling it when its expensive).

The problem is, not many automakers have included V2G capabilities in their cars, and in the cars that do have it, not many manufacturers have made V2G-capable equipment, and the ones who have built it haven’t seen that many customers who are interested in spending the extra money to upgrade their electrical systems with V2G-capable equipment.

So there needs to be something to jumpstart all of that, and California thinks it might just have the thing.

New CA law might require bidirectional charging… eventually.

The idea started in 2023 when state Senator Nancy Skinner introduced a bill which would require EVs to have bidirectional charging by 2027.

As this bill made its way through the legislative process, it got watered down from that ambitious timeline. So the current form of the bill, which is now called SB 59, took away that timeline and instead gave the California Energy Commission (CEC) the go-ahead to issue a requirement whenever they see it fit.

The bill directs the CEC, the California Air Resources Board, and the California Public Utilities Commission to examine the use cases of bidirectional charging and give them the power to require specific weight classes of EVs to be bidirectional-capable if a compelling use case exists.

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

The reason this can’t be done immediately is that cars take time to design, and while adding bidirectional charging to an EV isn’t the most difficult process, it also only really becomes useful with a whole ecosystem of services around the vehicle.

A recent chat Electrek had with DCBEL, making bidirectional chargers simpler for consumers

Even Tesla, which for years has touted itself a tech/energy company and sold powerwalls, inverters, solar panels and so on, is still only gradually trickling its bidirectional Powershare feature out onto its vehicles.

And that ecosystem has been a bit of a hard sell so far. It’s all well and good to tell someone they can make $500/year by selling energy 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 its energy storage. Some consumers might push back against that, so part of CEC’s job is to wait to pull the trigger until it becomes apparent that people are actually interested in the end-user use case for V2G – otherwise, no sense in requiring a feature that nobody is going to use.

Electrek’s Take

Given all of these influences, we wouldn’t expect CA to require bidirectional charging any time soon. But it still gives the state a powerful trigger to pull if other efforts, like the recently-signed smart grid law, turn out not to be enough as California works to, grow, clean up, and make its grid more affordable all at the same time.

But having the force of law behind it could turn V2G into less of a parlor trick and more into something that actually makes a difference the way us EV nerds 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 bidirectional charging soon means that those manufacturers will perhaps start taking V2G more seriously, particularly given the size and influence of CA’s car market. Even if the CEC doesn’t make it a requirement, the threat of it eventually becoming one means that EV-makers will probably start getting ready for it regardless.

There’s no real point to a single person discharging their car into the grid, but when millions of cars are involved, you could work to flatten out the famous “duck curve,” which describes the imbalance between electricity supply and demand. We hear a lot about “intermittency” as the problem with wind and solar, and grid storage as the solution to that, so being able to immediately switch on gigawatt-hours worth of installed storage capacity would certainly help to solve that problem. And we hope this law helps us get just a little closer to that potential future.


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Economists, experts call for governments to ditch hydrogen, go fully electric

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Economists, experts call for governments to ditch hydrogen, go fully electric

In a joint statement, French and German economists have called on governments to adopt “a common approach” to decarbonize European trucking fleets – and they’re calling for a focus on fully electric trucks, not hydrogen.

France and Germany are the two largest economies in the EU, and they share similar challenges when it comes to freight decarbonization. The two countries also share a border, and the traffic between the two nations generates major cross-border flows that create common externalities between the two countries.

At the same time, the EU’s transport sector has struggled to reduce emissions at the same rate as other industries – and road freight in particular is a major contributor to harmful carbon emissions issue due to that industry’s heavy reliance on diesel-powered trucks.

And for once, it seems like rail isn’t a viable option:

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While rail remains competitive mainly for heavy, homogeneous goods over long distances. Most freight in Europe is indeed transported over distances of less than 200 km and involves consignment weights of up to 30 tonnes (GCEE, 2024) In most such cases, transportation by rail instead of truck is not possible or not competitive. Moreover, taking into account the goods currently transported in intermodal transport units over distances of more than 300 km, the modal shift potential from road to rail would be only 6% in Germany and less than 2% in France.

FRANCO-GERMAN COUNCIL OF ECONOMIC EXPERTS (FGCEE)

That leaves trucks – and, while numerous government incentives currently exist to promote the parallel development of both hydrogen and battery electric vehicle infrastructures, the study is clear in picking a winner.

“Policies should focus on battery-electric trucks (BET) as these represent the most mature and market-ready technology for road freight transport,” reads the the FGCEE statement. “Hence, to ramp-up usage of BET public funding should be used to accelerate the roll-out of fast-charging networks along major corridors and in private depots.”

The appeal was signed by the co-chair of the advisory body on the German side is the chairwoman of the German Council of Economic Experts, Monika Schnitzer. Camille Landais co-chairs the French side. On the German side, the appeal was signed by four of the five experts; Nuremberg-based energy economist Veronika Grimm (who also sits on the National Hydrogen Council, which is committed to promoting H2 trucks and filling stations) did not sign.

You can read an English version of the CAE FGCEE joint statement here.

Electrek’s Take

Hydrogen-sceptical truck maker MAN to produce limited series of 200 vehicles with H2 combustion engines
MAN hydrogen semi; via MAN Trucks.

MAN Trucks’ CEO famously said that it was “impossible” for hydrogen to compete with BEVs, and even committed to building 200 hydrogen-powered semi truck to prove out that hypothesis.

He’s not alone. MAN’s board member for research and development, Frederik Zohm, said that the company is the one saying hydrogen still has years to go. “(MAN) continues to research fuel cell technology based on battery electrics,” he said, in a statement quoted by Hydrogen Insight, before another board member added that, “we (MAN) expect that, in the future, we will be able to best serve the vast majority of our customers’ transport applications with battery-electric trucks.”

With companies like Volvo and Renault and now Mercedes racking up millions of miles on their respective battery electric semi truck fleets, it’s no longer even close. EV is the way.

SOURCE | IMAGES: CAE FGCEE; via Electrive.

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Quick Charge | the terrifying Trump tariffs are finally upon us!

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Quick Charge | the terrifying Trump tariffs are finally upon us!

On today’s tariff-tastic episode of Quick Charge, we’ve got tariffs! Big ones, small ones, crazy ones, and fake ones – but whether or not you agree with the Trump tariffs coming into effect tomorrow, one thing is absolutely certain: they are going to change the price you pay for your next car … and that price won’t be going down!

Everyone’s got questions about what these tariffs are going to mean for their next car buying experience, but this is a bigger question, since nearly every industry in the US uses cars and trucks to move their people and products – and when their costs go up, so do yours.

Prefer listening to your podcasts? Audio-only versions of Quick Charge are now available on Apple PodcastsSpotifyTuneIn, and our RSS feed for Overcast and other podcast players.

New episodes of Quick Charge are recorded, usually, Monday through Thursday (and sometimes Sunday). We’ll be posting bonus audio content from time to time as well, so be sure to follow and subscribe so you don’t miss a minute of Electrek’s high-voltage daily news.

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Got news? Let us know!
Drop us a line at tips@electrek.co. You can also rate us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or recommend us in Overcast to help more people discover the show.

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SunZia Wind’s massive 2.4 GW project hits a big milestone

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SunZia Wind’s massive 2.4 GW project hits a big milestone

GE Vernova has produced over half the turbines needed for SunZia Wind, which will be the largest wind farm in the Western Hemisphere when it comes online in 2026.

GE Vernova has manufactured enough turbines at its Pensacola, Florida, factory to supply over 1.2 gigawatts (GW) of the turbines needed for the $5 billion, 2.4 GW SunZia Wind, a project milestone. The wind farm will be sited in Lincoln, Torrance, and San Miguel counties in New Mexico.

At a ribbon-cutting event for Pensacola’s new customer experience center, GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik noted that since 2023, the company has invested around $70 million in the Pensacola factory.

The Pensacola investments are part of the announcement GE Vernova made in January that it will invest nearly $600 million in its US factories and facilities over the next two years to help meet the surging electricity demands globally. GE Vernova says it’s expecting its investments to create more than 1,500 new US jobs.

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Vic Abate, CEO of GE Vernova Wind, said, “Our dedicated employees in Pensacola are working to address increasing energy demands for the US. The workhorse turbines manufactured at this world-class factory are engineered for reliability and scalability, ensuring our customers can meet growing energy demand.”

SunZia Wind and Transmission will create US history’s largest clean energy infrastructure project.

Read more: The largest clean energy project in US history closes $11B, starts full construction


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