A blistering heat dome in the eastern US has pushed the power system to the brink of a widespread emergency, raising the risk of a major blackout.
But the vehicles that critics love to blame for grid strain managed to feed their stored power back into the grid via their V2G capability. A record number of vehicle-to-grid-capable EVs, especially school buses, discharged their batteries just as demand hit historic highs.
Quiet heroes
The emergency was real. Across 30 states, 160 million people were under extreme heat alerts. The US Department of Energy (DoE) issued an emergency order to maximize power generation and prepare for load shedding. The nation’s largest regional grid serves 65 million customers.
Due to an extreme cooling boost, demand was scheduled to reach a record-breaking 166,147 MW on July 2. Fossil fuel plants were fired up on the order of the DoE, and, as a last resort, data centers with backup generation were curtailed.
But the quiet heroes were yellow. Roughly 230 electric school buses in fully deployed V2G projects supplied about 8 MWh of power back to the grid at any given time during the crisis. That powers roughly 1,600 typical US homes for up to four hours. It’s not the most critical metric, but peak load dropped, which shows how much potential there is.
‘Important backbone’
The buses were an easy fix, as they are mostly idle during the summer months. They are not a regular sight at American schools, but California has a large fleet that managed to send its power as far as North Carolina.
Steve Letendre, senior advisor to the Vehicle Grid Integration Council, told Reuters that school buses “will be a critically important backbone of V2G capacity.”
The logic is simple. School buses have large batteries. Some exceed 200 kWh. They charge when demand is low. They sit unused exactly when summer heat drives air-conditioning demand through the roof.
This was not a single project. Exactly 21 states are involved in school bus V2G projects. And it’s not only a rescue buoy in critical situations. Bidirectional technology can lower electricity costs for all by reducing utilities’ need to buy expensive peak power on wholesale markets.
The old frame is dead
Carmakers are stepping in, too, and have signed contracts with these utility companies. General Motors and Rivian both announced partnerships, with their EVs capable of participating in utility-managed charging and V2G programs.
The Chargescape platform is also backed by BMW, Ford, Honda, and Nissan, and is already used by Tesla and Stellantis. The scaling of these bidirectional benefits is clearly taking off.
For years, anti-EV lobbying – especially in the US – has claimed that electric cars are depleting the grid. Millions of electric cars plugging in after work would crash the grid on hot summer evenings.
But the most important lesson from the school bus intervention is that it also works the other way around. Last week, EVs in the US helped keep the grid stable when demand was high. However, to make a meaningful difference at the grid scale, the V2G capacity of school buses still has to grow exponentially.
