We have been chronicling California’s conversion to a green energy theocracy, where the legislature imposes rules on fuel limitations that cannot currently be met by today’s technology.
Not content with just denying the sales of new fossil-fuel-powered vehicles by 2035, the legislature is now considering a measure that would mandate that electric vehicles offer bidirectional charging capabilities.
The California legislature has introduced a bill that would mandate bidirectional charging capability for all new EVs sold in the state beginning in 2027.First spotted by Charged EVs, SB 233 has passed the California Senate Energy Committee and now heads to the Senate Transportation Committee April 25 for further consideration. If enacted, the bill would ensure all new EVs sold in California after 2027 would have the ability to discharge power from their battery packs to assist the power grid, or provide a backup power source for homes.“SB 233 will make EVs more attractive to consumers by enabling them to use their car batteries to power their homes,” State Senator Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), the bill’s sponsor, said in a statement.
Bidirectional charging, on the other hand, turns charging into a two-way street: Electricity can flow from the grid to charge the vehicle, or it can flow from the EV back into the grid or into a home, office building or appliance. With bidirectional charging, DC power must be converted back to AC through a dedicated charger or an inverter within the vehicle itself.
Pacific Gas and Electric has been piloting multi-directional EV charging since 2022.
Bidirectional charging got its first big boost after the 2011 Tōhoku-Oki earthquake, and in 2017, Nissan told Ars that several thousand EV-to-grid installations had already been completed in Japan. But at the time, the company had no immediate plans to enable the function here in the US. Since then, Nissan has conducted other vehicle-to-grid experiments, such as powering a convenience store.Ford has made more noise about the forthcoming F-150 Lightning’s vehicle-to-home ability. When Ford President and CEO Jim Farley first revealed the name of Ford’s electric pickup, he also mentioned that the truck could “power your home in an outage.” This functionality will require Ford’s 80-amp charging station, which can supply a home with up to 9.6 kW of electricity. (For context, the F-150 Lightning will come with either 98 kWh or 131 kWh useable-capacity battery packs.)
Currently, only a few EV models have bidirectional capacity.
Only a handful of EVs are currently capable of bi-directional charging: the Hyundai Ioniq 5, Kia EV6 and Ford F-150 Lightning to name a few. California has already experimented with the technology. In the summer of 2022, GM partnered with Northern California energy company PG&E to deploy a fleet of EVs to bolster the power grid there.
Small-scale experiments are one thing. Mandating technology that has not been fully developed, or the consequences of its production and use fully realized, is likely to be a failure at best…and a society-level disaster at worst.
However, to be fair, California is desperate for anything that can help its increasingly challenged power infrastructure and support its green energy beliefs.
The state’s grid is powered, in part, by renewable energy, including solar power and hydropower.The solar supply decreases toward the end of the day, prompting the calls to reduce energy use after 3 p.m. or 4 p.m. There can also be uncertainty with solar supply due to factors such as cloud cover and smoke from wildfires, as the state battles several blazes.”We’ve seen situations where smoke and cloud cover can have an effect. If it’s over a populated area, it could have more effect of reducing demand, where if the smoke and cloud cover is over the solar fields, it can have an effect on the availability of supply,” Mark Rothleder, the ISO’s senior vice president and chief operating officer, told reporters during a press briefing Thursday.
The scariest part of this report? The bureaucrats are already counting their wattage eggs before they hatch.
As the state moves into an all-electric future, “bidirectional vehicles can play a huge role to get to where we need to go, faster,” she said.California’s cars will have 60,000 megawatts of stored energy in batteries by 2030, according to Siva Gunda of the California Energy Commission. If only 10% of that could be returned to the grid, “we can get through what we went through last year without turning on the backup generators,” said Gunda.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY