GM’s Bidirectional Charging: Your EV Could Become a Home Power Plant

General Motors has quietly equipped roughly 250,000 of its electric vehicles with a hidden talent: the ability to send power from their batteries back into your home—and, as of this week, into your neighborhood’s electrical grid. S. competitors.

Here’s the gist: Instead of just drawing power, an EV can act as a mobile battery. During a multi-day outage, it could keep your refrigerator running and lights on. On a scorching summer afternoon when everyone cranks the AC, your car could feed electricity back to the grid, helping the local utility avoid blackouts.

And for the owner, there’s a potential payoff: charge up when rates are low, sell power back when demand spikes.

“We can turn every GM EV on the road into a distributed power resource,” said Sterling Anderson, GM’s chief product officer, at a San Francisco event this week.

But the tech isn’t cheap or simple. To use your car as a home battery, you’ll need to buy a system from GM’s Energy subsidiary—which reportedly costs around $20,000, plus installation. GM says homeowners typically recoup that cost in about five years through utility payments. However, those payments depend on your local utility having a program in place.

, only a few have partnered with GM so far. The company says its customer base for this service is in the “thousands,” not the hundreds of thousands of compatible vehicles on the road.

” To boost that, GM announced two new utility partnerships this week: a stress test with Michigan’s DTE Energy involving 30 employees, and a plan to connect 52,000 GM EVs to Northern California’s PG&E grid by 2030.

Still, experts caution that vehicle-to-grid technology is in its infancy. Researchers at UC Irvine spent years launching a pilot with just six homes in Southern California. “Here we are two years later—not four weeks later—and utilities are just beginning to address this,” said Scott Samuelsen, the project’s director.

GM also must ensure owners don’t get stranded with a dead battery after the grid draws power. Future systems might learn your schedule and hold enough charge for the morning commute. “We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how drivers interact with their vehicles,” Scheffer said.

For now, the promise is real, but the road ahead is long.