Owners of all-electric Chevrolets and other GM brands will soon be able to use their cars as backup generators to power their homes during an outage or during peak demand days.
GM said Tuesday it is bringing its vehicle-to-home (V2H) bidirectional charging technology to its entire lineup of Ultium-based electric vehicles by model year 2026.
Ultium is GM’s new electric platform that includes a new battery design and serves as the foundation for the automaker’s EV plans and supports a range of future vehicle models.
“GM Energy’s growing ecosystem of energy management solutions will help accelerate GM’s vision of an all-electric future by further expanding access to even more benefits that EVs can offer,” Wade Sheffer, vice president of GM Energy, said in a statement. “By integrating V2H across our entire Ultium-based portfolio, we are making this groundbreaking technology available to more consumers, with benefits that extend well beyond the vehicle itself, and at broader scale than ever before.”
The V2H offering follows a pilot that began last year with Pacific Gas and Electric Company in California.
The first vehicles to receive the technology will be the 2024 Chevrolet Silverado EV RST, the 2024 GMC Sierra EV Denali Edition 1, the 2024 Chevrolet Blazer EV, the 2024 Chevrolet Equinox EV, the 2024 Cadillac Lyriq and the upcoming Cadillac Escalade IQ, which has a reveal date set for August 9.
GM’s V2H offering is part of its new business unit called GM Energy, which the company launched in October 2022. GM Energy promotes a new line of energy products to homeowners, businesses and utilities — everything from stationary energy storage, solar energy through a partnership with SunPower and bi-directional charging technology.
Customers who want to use V2H technology will have to purchase the Ultium Home V2H Bundle, which includes GM’s PowerShift Charger and a V2H enablement kit. Those hardware products are powered by GM’s Energy Cloud software platform that will let users manage the flow of energy between their cars and their home. GM has not yet released pricing on any of its energy products.
While Tesla doesn’t offer bidirectional charging at the moment, GM’s move into energy follows the path that the Elon Musk-owned company set out. GM’s stationary storage system is akin to Tesla’s Powerwall product, which can be powered by the automaker’s solar panels. Solar sales saw a slump in Tesla’s second quarter earnings, but the company’s energy storage business is booming.
