In a first, electric Ford F-150 trucks are powering homes in Baltimore

For the first time ever, electric Ford F-150 drivers are getting paid to run their homes from their pickup truck batteries during peak hours to help meet grid demand. And the pathbreaking program is happening in Baltimore, a city better known for the creation of Old Bay seasoning and ​“The Star-Spangled Banner” than transformative grid policies.

When it rolled out the F-150 Lightning in 2021, Ford made a splash by designing a backup power mode: If the owner’s house loses power from the grid, the capacious truck battery can run the house instead. That’s a clean and quiet alternative to a fossil-fueled generator, but it hinted at something far more potent: What if you could put that battery to work all the time, for the benefit of not just the driver but the entire electricity system?

A lot of utilities are talking about this. California’s PG&E, for instance, is looking to enroll up to 1,000 customers in a similar residential pilot program, which it describes as 0 percent subscribed at this time. Other utilities have started programs internally, for employees or their families.

But Baltimore Gas and Electric, the local subsidiary of mega-utility Exelon, appears to be the first provider to actually enroll and pay customers for sending their EV batteries’ stored energy into their homes.

BGE launched its pilot program in June with Ford and solar and battery company Sunrun. EV owners simply plug in their trucks, and they automatically discharge to cover home energy usage between 5:00 and 9:00 p.m. on summer weeknights, when the electricity system is stretched thin cooling homes. Then the trucks automatically recharge overnight, when demand is lower and supply is more available.

If this concept — known to wonks as vehicle-to-home (V2H), or vehicle-to-grid (V2G) when the power flows beyond the household — grows from its current footprint in Baltimore, it could galvanize the broader transition to low-carbon electric driving. First, it could provide compensation that defrays the cost of owning an electric vehicle, which largely remains a luxury purchase in the U.S. Second, intelligent use of these batteries can turn the arrival of masses of electric vehicles from a grid problem into a grid resource.

If millions of EV drivers plug in to charge at the exact times when the grid is most taxed, that could cause serious issues for power supply and reliability. But if EVs can be managed in a way that encourages charging at times when electricity is cheap and overabundant, and then programs like BGE’s shift some of that power to peak hours, the growing EV fleet could help avoid grid instability, said Kristy Fleischmann Groncki, senior manager of smart grid and innovation at BGE.

“As EV adoption continues in our state, we really need a plan for that increased load on our system,” Fleischmann Groncki told Canary Media. ​“If we’re able to bring that peak down by utilizing customer EVs to offset their houses from grid demand, that will help smooth this out overall.”

It wouldn’t take much to make a real impact this way. Sunrun’s Head of Grid Services Chris Rauscher pointed out that the U.S. has nearly 4 million EVs on the road today. If they all were configured to discharge an easy 5 kilowatts to the grid for a given period, that would add 20 million kilowatts onto the wires, or 20,000 megawatts. That’s roughly twice the capacity of all the grid batteries California built over the last decade. That kind of a swing resource could put an end to blackouts from electricity shortfalls during extreme heat waves, like California experienced in 2020.

“The impact of this resource is going to be enormous,” Rauscher said. ​“You’ll see this become ubiquitous.”

Unlocking vehicle-to-home electricity exchange

Nobody could accuse vehicle-to-grid functionality of ubiquity today, and the Baltimore program illuminates the practical challenges of turning EVs into grid assets.

First, Ford and Sunrun needed a utility willing to sign up. Utilities aren’t known for jumping onto novel technologies, but BGE already had grant funding from the U.S. Department of Energy for advanced EV-charging programs and opted to put some of that toward the Lightning trial.

“They were totally open to trying something innovative and doing it quickly,” Rauscher said.

It took BGE a year to secure approval from state regulators for the program. Then, Sunrun, Ford, and BGE sought out every F-150 Lightning owner in the utility territory who had installed the advanced two-way charger needed for the backup power mode. They found and enrolled three households — which Rauscher gamely described as ​“100 percent enrollment of eligible customers.”

They had to work with the electric F-150, because it was the first mass-produced electric vehicle in the U.S. with built-in power discharge capabilities that were allowed under the warranty. A few more models are joining Ford in this — for instance, GM says its new 2024 Chevy Silverado EV pickup can power a home, but the photo on its website carries a disclaimer — ​“Simulated charger shown” — that suggests a working product is not yet available. Nissan allowed Leaf owners to discharge power in 2022, but at the time it was available only for commercial configurations, not residences.

The BGE pilot program’s three-truck turnout reflects the fact that not many people currently own a Ford electric pickup. The company sold a little more than 24,000 last year, while it sold 761,455 F-Series trucks; Ford reduced production of the Lightning earlier this year in response to soft sales numbers.

Even fewer people have installed the necessary two-way charger, which costs around $9,000 (that’s expensive, but Sunrun prefers to compare it with the cost of a fossil-fueled backup generator, which doesn’t provide additional benefits beyond a power outage).

When the technical work began, Ford and Sunrun pushed out firmware updates virtually, so no site visits were necessary. But it took some fine-tuning of the Wi-Fi, cellular, and Bluetooth communications that all the devices need to talk to each other to get the trucks sending power into the house during the right hours.

IT professional and EV enthusiast Brian Foreman of Howard County became the first adopter of the program, and he was able to put his technical mindset to good use. His truck needed some troubleshooting to get all the necessary systems in line, but since June 21 it has run seamlessly, he said.

“It’s amazing how well it works; it’ll just switch over and start running the house,” he told Canary Media. The electronic appliances don’t flicker, and the clock on the coffee maker doesn’t skip a beat. He’s been ​“stressing it out some” to test the system — even using the Ford battery to charge his Tesla Model 3. So far, he hasn’t hit any technical limits, even amid record heat.

Next steps: Customer compensation, expand to new utilities

Longer term, the success of vehicle-to-home depends on convincing more utilities to design programs, and that entails finding compensation structures that make sense for EV owners and utilities alike.

Clean energy advocates talk up virtual power plants like they’re a no-brainer: People are already spending their own money on solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles; if utilities paid them a little bit to use those devices in ways that solve grid problems, the whole utility customer base could save money compared with business as usual, which might otherwise default to expensive substation upgrades or fossil-gas peaker-plant expansion.

In practice, it’s been harder to nail down a price point for customer energy programs that utilities and regulators think is fair to the overall customer base, but that is sufficiently attractive to engage participants. Baltimore offers a starting point for negotiation in the vehicle-to-home category.

The pilot’s three participants get paid $200 per kilowatt-month for however much home consumption they meet with the truck batteries. So if they average a mere 2 kilowatts during the peak hours, they take home $400 per month (just by plugging in at night). If they push to 5 kilowatts, roughly half of the Lightning’s peak discharge capacity, that translates to $1,000 a month. That’s enough to help with a car payment or the cost of the charger.

That generous level of compensation is for the pilot, because the early adopters are putting in more work to help calibrate the program, Fleischmann Groncki said. If this transitions into a permanent, full-scale program, the payment will likely be lower to ensure cost-effectiveness, she added.

More of these advanced EV programs are on the way. Maryland recently passed the DRIVE Act, which creates opportunities for utilities to incentivize the purchase of smart-charging equipment for customers who enroll in grid programs. BGE is working on a full-scale plan for vehicle-to-grid operations by July 2025 and already has proposed a managed charging program. Currently, BGE customers are not allowed to discharge from an EV battery into the grid, so they’re limited to supplying their own household usage; the new law could change that, opening up the chance for EV owners to export more power and make more money.

Sunrun is hopeful that more communities around the country will pursue similar programs, now that BGE has established the technical feasibility.

“It should give much, much higher confidence to other utilities around the country that this can and should be done today,” Rauscher said. ​“The barriers may only be perceived barriers, and we can move faster, as Baltimore Gas and Electric has shown.”