MANY MINDEDMassachusetts to test paying EV owners to feed the grid
Eversource, National Grid, EnergyHub, Sunrun, and The Mobility House have announced a joint effort to test vehicle-to-grid capability in Massachusetts. Qualifying residential customers of the two utilities can enroll V2G-capable EVs in the existing Connected Solutions program, which already pools flexible capacity from thermostats, batteries, and commercial and industrial resources to ease grid strain. Enrolled cars will send stored energy back during peak demand periods, and participating drivers receive incentives.
The scale of the opportunity is in the fleet. Massachusetts has more than 150,000 EVs on the road, each a rolling battery. EnergyHub, the platform partner and an Alarm.com subsidiary, already manages over 2.6 million distributed energy resources and more than 3.5 GW of dispatchable flexible capacity for 240-plus utilities. National Grid is already applying V2G to light- and medium-duty fleets, starting with school buses, and Eversource is in talks with school districts under its ConnectedSolutions+ offering.
For abundance, this reframes millions of parked cars as grid storage. Tapping that capacity during peaks can defer expensive new plants and firm up reliability without building dedicated batteries, which keeps electricity cheaper and more resilient for everyone on the network.
What to watch is uptake and the actual incentive economics — this is a press release announcing a pilot, and specific payment amounts and enrollment terms are not stated. Whether residential drivers sign up in numbers, and whether the incentives cover battery wear, will determine if V2G moves from test to standard practice.
Source: CleanTechnica