GM: Electric Vehicles to the Rescue of the Energy Grid

At an event in San Francisco, General Motors unveiled a series of initiatives aimed at integrating electric vehicles (EVs) into the energy grid to meet the growing electricity demand from artificial intelligence (AI) data centers. The company announced the activation of new vehicle-to-grid verification capabilities for its current EV and home energy customers. Additionally, GM revealed a new commercial energy storage system strategy, based on newly developed sodium-ion batteries for large-scale grid applications. A new feature was also introduced to simplify public charging for EV owners.

Currently, millions of electric vehicles are parked in driveways across the country, with a significant amount of electrons stored in their batteries. GM bets that even if EV sales slow down, utilities will want to collaborate with automakers to use these batteries as a potential solution to the energy demand crisis. This is also the latest effort by the largest automaker in North America to establish itself in the energy generation and storage market, a sector it has been trying to conquer for nearly four years.

“We envision a future where electric vehicles, the batteries that power them, and the country’s power grids work together,” said Sterling Anderson, GM's product director, in prepared remarks for the event.

Electric vehicles stand out for their ability to send energy back to the grid while drawing power when they charge. Many EVs are equipped with this bidirectional charging capability, allowing energy flow in both directions. Essentially, this allows high-capacity lithium-ion batteries to be viewed not only as tools to power EVs but also as backup storage cells to charge other electrical devices, an entire home, or even to send energy back to the power grid for potential savings.

As AI data centers exert increasing pressure on the grid, GM believes that its hundreds of thousands of electric vehicles can help alleviate the load. The company claims that with bidirectional charging capabilities, EVs can send energy back to the grid during peak demand periods. Thus, GM plans to release a firmware update to enable its vehicle-to-home system customers to send energy to the grid (vehicle-to-grid, or V2G). GM customers who already have the equipment will automatically receive the update.

GM states that there are currently over 250,000 bidirectionally capable electric vehicles on U.S. roads. Theoretically, their combined battery capacity is sufficient to power 120,000 homes for an entire week.

GM is already testing this theory in two states. In Northern California, the company is partnering with PG&E to develop a localized fleet of 52,000 electric vehicles for “grid balancing protocols,” which are expected to be operational by 2030. And in Michigan, GM is collaborating with DTE Energy to “test the resilience” of bidirectional charging using the homes of 30 of its employees as real-world test cases. In addition to benefiting utilities, the company claims that EV owners could also gain a financial advantage.

“By injecting flexibility into a historically rigid system, V2G technology can simultaneously reduce overall energy costs, create potential financial returns for consumers, and enhance the systemic reliability of the grid,” Anderson stated.

However, activating V2G technology is not as simple as flipping a switch. In an open letter, Wade Sheffer, vice president of GM Energy, urged regulators to formalize V2G infrastructure, citing reports from the International Energy Agency (IEA) identifying V2G as the technology offering the greatest hourly flexibility to limit future investment costs in the grid. Sheffer stated that the automotive industry must collaborate with the government to raise public awareness of the benefits of V2G technology. Furthermore, utilities need to simplify the administrative process to allow their customers to easily enroll in future projects.

GM is also working on new industrial-scale solutions, partnering with California-based Peak Energy to develop and deploy sodium-ion chemistry for energy storage systems. Sodium is considered by some to be an improvement over lithium, both in terms of availability and stability. This material is more cost-effective to obtain and is not subject to the same safety risks as lithium, which can catch fire under certain circumstances. Additionally, sodium-ion batteries perform better in cold weather than lithium-ion batteries. Some major battery manufacturers, like China's CATL, estimate that sodium-ion batteries could potentially replace up to half of the lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery market that currently dominates the sector.

GM asserts that sodium-ion chemistry is well-suited for commercial energy storage but not necessarily for electric vehicles, as it prioritizes “longevity, high cycle and calendar life, and intense economic efficiency.” The company is also collaborating with Redwood Materials to build energy storage systems from batteries manufactured in the U.S., as well as “second-life” EV packs from GM vehicles. For its EV batteries, GM is betting on lithium manganese-rich (LMR) batteries to bridge the gap between the U.S. and China.

Finally, GM announced Energy Pass, a new feature that will appear across all its mobile applications. Energy Pass allows owners of Chevy, Cadillac, and GMC EVs to find, start, and pay for charging from multiple third-party charging operators, including Tesla, Electrify America, and IONNA. (The company also plans to add EVgo and ChargePoint.) Owners can now use their mobile app to find a charger, initiate a charging session, and pay without having to sign up for a separate account for each provider.

The lack of convenient and reliable charging is often cited in customer surveys as a major barrier to purchasing an EV. GM is adopting Tesla's NACS charging standard for its future vehicles, as the company's Superchargers are widely regarded as one of the best EV charging networks in the world.

Recently, GM has been striving to expand its EV business to include a variety of energy storage and charging projects. The company launched GM Energy, its energy subsidiary, in 2022 to compete in the rapidly growing home energy market. In an effort to compete with Tesla in the $150 billion home energy market, GM is offering several products, including home EV chargers, stationary batteries for homes, and vehicle-to-home (V2H) kits that allow a home to draw energy from an EV battery in the event of a power outage.