The solution to your power grid problems may be sitting in your driveway

You can’t know that When you pass one on the highway, but an electric car can be super powerful. It is charged by plugging it into the electrical grid, of course, but it may also be able to return power to it. For a growing number of electric vehicles, vehicle-to-grid, or V2G, technology creates a revenue stream for drivers, who pay to tap their batteries when demand on the grid spikes.

Utilities across the country are pursuing pilot projects for the technology, figuring out how to coordinate hundreds, thousands, and eventually millions of electric vehicles. To that end, a coalition of companies — Eversource, National Grid, EnergyHub, Sunrun, and Mobility House — today is launching an early test of the technology in Massachusetts so utility customers can try it out. Lessons learned here and elsewhere could push this technology into the mainstream, making the grid more reliable and electricity cheaper, even if you don’t own an electric car. “It’s great that Massachusetts is stepping up to the plate here and doing this because these are the lessons that will allow this technology to scale,” said Chip Silverman, director of grid services at Sunrun, a solar and battery company.

In the new system, participants join an existing program called ConnectedSolutions, which allows homes to discharge their residential batteries, among other things. Then when there is a “demand response” event, such as during a heat wave, EV batteries can help the grid keep up. Participants are compensated for this, just like some homeowners who provide energy from their solar panels.

“It’s really a small number of hours per year that you’re discharging the battery,” said Russell Farr, vice president of vehicle network integration at Mobility House North America, a company that provides charging infrastructure. “It’s not necessarily like a daily discharge. It’s only during peak times that events are called.”

Enables tools like V2G because they address escalating and intersecting challenges. On the one hand, demand for electricity is growing as more power-hungry data centers emerge and people shift from internal combustion cars to electric vehicles and from gas furnaces to heat pumps. Meanwhile, utilities are trying to ditch gas and coal in favor of renewable energy sources like wind and solar. However, these clean techniques are intermittent, as the wind is not always blowing and the sun is not always shining. Utilities need ways to store energy for later use, which is why they are building storage facilities and even using the land itself as a giant battery.

Americans are already suffering from skyrocketing energy prices for several reasons. For example, utility shareholders reap profits, and customers foot the bill for improvements, such as burying power lines so they don’t spark wildfires or fall down in a storm. Building battery facilities and connecting transmission lines will add more costs, which is the inevitable price to pay for a cleaner, more reliable grid.

Except that some of this spending may actually be avoidable: the promise of V2G technology is that it can make electricity cheaper. While participants need a two-way charger to send power back to the grid, utilities don’t need to reinvent the system as a whole. Electric vehicle batteries are an existing, ubiquitous, and reliable source of backup power to tap into during times of high demand, like the summer when everyone turns on their air conditioning. “It is the cheapest cost of flexible energy storage that will be available to the grid,” Farr said.

The hotter the planet gets, the more V2G searches for facilities. People need extra air conditioning to stay healthy, but running appliances requires a lot of energy. If this energy is not coming from renewable energy sources, it causes more global warming and increased demand for air conditioners, etc. In a V2G system, vehicles that follow predictable schedules, such as school buses and municipal fleets, would be particularly useful, plus their batteries are huge stores of energy. However, even a typical electric car battery has six times the capacity of a backup unit installed outside the home.