Two recent developments in EV policy emerged first in California. What do they mean to us here in the Four Corners? The first bolsters bidirectional home charging.
In September, California Governor Gavin Newsome signed into law a requirement that new EVs to be sold in California must be capable of bidirectional charging. What is that? It means that not only can an EV receive juice from the grid, but it can also send juice to the grid. Why bother?
Consumers have one motivation: keeping the frig cold and lights on during a power outage. As electric utilities have been hit with hefty fines for starting forest fires with their wind-whipped power lines, they have taken to turning the grid off when the winds are strong. Consumers want to keep working (or watching the Broncos game) despite the wind.
From the utilities’ perspective, the advantage of bidirectional charging is that it can reduce the expense of storing the excess electricity when power demands are less than supply, so that utilities can pull the juice out of storage when demand exceeds supply. Stationary battery storage is fairly expensive for utilities, but the residential garages of California are filled with mobile batteries that could be called upon to bolster the grid in a crunch. Suppose at 7 PM all the cooking and other home power draws start to exceed the grid’s supply of electricity (this is the typical pattern in the Four Corners). If the power company were to offer you a small financial reward to ensure that your EV would be fully charged before you awoke in the morning if you would just allow them to siphon off a few miles of EV battery power to get them through the evening shortage, would you bite? Some would.
Notice that although bidirectional charging is required for both the consumer’s blackout protection and the utility’s load-smoothing application, they work somewhat differently and require different rules, regulations, permissions, payments, and hardware. All California did was mandate that new EVs sold in California (exact date to be determined) would be capable of bidirectional charging. In fact, bidirectional charging is already possible if a Californian owns a Ford Lightning pickup truck and has a Ford bidirectional charger installed at home. Other combinations of vehicles and chargers may not work. Chevy, Tesla, and Rivian pickup trucks are being promoted as bidirectional-ready, but who knows whether a teased Chevy pickup will work with a Ford bidirectional charger? California evidently wanted to get ahead of yet another hardware incompatibility problem by mandating some hardware standards. I presume the various car manufacturers will have a seat at the regulation-crafting table, but they will be forced to agree on a single bidirectional charging protocol that will be adopted by all the car manufacturers doing business in California.
This is analogous to what the federal government did with household electricity. In the beginning, different electrical utilities adopted different voltages, frequencies, and indeed whether the flow was to be alternating current or direct current. The federal government of the time took a leadership role and enticed the utilities to adopt a single standard, so that electric appliances could be used anywhere in the country. One wishes that the federal government was still up to that leadership role, but in recent decades it has passed the baton to California. The last Trump Administration did not like the California regs and attempted to prohibit California from playing that leadership role. Plans are once again afoot to prohibit California clean air rules; stay tuned.
Returning to the two uses of bidirectional charging, the ability to keep the lights on in your home from your EV’s battery during a blackout is sometimes called vehicle-to-home or “V2H”. The ability to help the utility match demand to supply has a correspondingly homely acronym “V2G” or vehicle-to-grid. The difference is that with V2G each EV is potentially its own power station, pushing power onto the grid and giving the engineers who design grids conniptions about incompatibilities and safety (a lineman working to fix a disabled circuit cannot risk touching a wire that has been made hot by a homeowner intent on finishing the Broncos game).
I recently spoke with La Plata Electric Association’s Vice President of Infrastructure Dan Harms about California’s initiative. He forcefully stressed the difference between V2H and V2G. He sees V2H as quickly and easily implemented and comparatively inexpensive for the homeowner. In contrast, he foresees V2G as being years and many regulatory hurdles into the future.
He also suggested that enthusiasm for V2H will be low in our area, for several reasons in addition to the rarity of our power outages. One problem is that most homeowners will not wish to power their entire homes off their EV battery, as home power consumption may be large in comparison to the EV’s battery size. The size of the EV battery and the efficiency of the home are important: a large EV battery can supply an efficient home for as many as 20 days, whereas a plug-in hybrid (PHEV) battery could supply the same home for about 2 days, and fully supply an inefficient home for a few hours. For many V2H fans, the solution is smart switches and special software that enable the user (typically via an internet-based smartphone app) to turn off non-essential loads during an outage. For example, by turning off most loads except essential lights and the refrigerator. But what about the internet; do you get your internet via Wifi? Can you ensure Wifi reception during an outage? For most homes the answer is yes, but you may need to have special arrangements to ensure that all the routers, receivers, modems, etc. are on circuits that are powered during an outage. Also, water pumps, the car charger, etc. And if the power outage was induced by a natural disaster such as a fire or hurricane, you might want to retain a fairly full EV battery in case you need to make a fast getaway. It can get complicated/expensive.
Which brings us to the second big news story involving California EV regulations. Toyota is against them. They just announced an effort to have the EV regulations relaxed (gutted?), presumably so that they can continue to make money off standard cars (hybrids or otherwise, but mainly gasoline powered). Toyota was also the largest player in the 2024 lobbying campaign on the Biden Administration to change accounting rules so that plug-in hybrids counted as full EVs for the federal deadlines requiring increased EV adoption. Toyota got their way with the Biden Administration and the mandated numbers of EV sales have been halved, so perhaps there is a deeper agenda being pursued with the new Toyota lobbying effort. Some of the Republican plans for the Trump Administration call for revoking California’s authority to regulate clean air in that state. That might set up an interesting battle within the Trump Administration. On the one side is an influential Trump donor and announced deregulator (Elon Musk) who makes much of Tesla’s profit from selling “indulgences” to companies such as Toyota that fail to meet the state’s emission standards. On the other side is Toyota and other EV-delayers so visibly represented in the incoming Administration.
Delaying its EV adoption also may be suicidal for Toyota (https://cleantechnica.com/2024/11/11/Toyota-is-digging-its-own-grave/). In the linked piece the author argues that victory in the California battle, should that occur, would expedite Toyota’s demise as the world’s largest seller of automobiles. As it now stands, the capitalizations of the world’s top three automakers are in the order: 1) Tesla (which makes only EVs), 2) Toyota (one EV out of hundreds of models: the BZ4X), and 3) BYD, the Chinese EV/PHEV producer that is taking Europe and the most cost-conscious parts of the world (like Ethiopia) by storm with their affordable EVs. Those parsimonious parts of the world are Toyota’s historic global sales base. BYD’s vehicle sales recently exceeded 500,000 per month. They recently added as much new production capacity in three months as Tesla sells in a year. This makes it hard to argue, as Toyota has repeatedly, that demand is too weak to support EV sales. The captains of industry have a long history of failing to stay ahead of a fast-changing market. Is Toyota the next stubborn example?
Thanks to Dan Harms and Chris Calwell for contributing to this piece.
