GM’s 250,000 Bidirectional EVs Hit a 3,000-Utility Wall

General Motors flipped a switch this week that turns more than 250,000 of its US electric vehicles into potential power plants. The auto giant pushed a software update enabling bidirectional EV charging, the ability for an EV battery to send electricity back out as well as take it in. Twelve of GM’s electric models are now capable of running a home, supporting a local grid, or both, more than US competitors’ electric lineups, according to WIRED.

The hardware is ready. The grid, GM’s chief product officer Sterling Anderson said Tuesday at the company’s Empower 2026 event in San Francisco, is the harder problem. Anderson framed the move as part of GM’s answer to “how do we make a car more valuable?” The push lands in a US power system straining under new demand from AI data centers, and amid policy about-faces that have upended US EV sales projections, WIRED reports.

A Quarter-Million Cars That Can Already Run a House

GM says more than 250,000 of its EVs on US roads are now bidirectional-capable. The Chevrolet Equinox EV, GMC Sierra EV, and Cadillac LYRIQ are among 12 models that can send electricity back out through a compatible home charger, according to the company’s explanation of how the technology works. The capability is what lets a parked car keep a refrigerator, lights, and air conditioning running when the neighborhood loses power. In a properly equipped home with the right hardware, GM says a V2H-capable EV can sustain a house for days during a grid failure.

The functionality splits into two distinct uses, and GM is leaning on both. In the first, vehicle-to-home, the EV sends power back into the house during a blackout, but doesn’t feed the wider grid. In the second, vehicle-to-grid, a participating utility program allows the parked car to discharge into the local network during expensive peak hours, earning the owner a credit on the bill. Anderson, the GM product chief, said the goal is to “turn every GM EV on the road into a distributed power resource,” WIRED reported. Both flavors run on the same on-board hardware already in the 12 models; the new piece is software.

The most-cited number is “for days,” GM’s framing of how long a V2H-equipped home can run on a charged EV. The UC Irvine team running a parallel V2H pilot in six Southern California homes has put a number to it. The energy density of a typical EV battery is up to 10 times that of a standard home backup battery, the researchers said in a study announced last October.

• Vehicle-to-Home (V2H): run a properly equipped house during an outage, with no grid connection.
• Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G): feed stored energy back to the local grid during peak demand through a participating utility program.
• Time-of-use optimization: charge when rates are low and discharge when rates are high, lowering the owner’s electricity bill.

The $20,000 Wall

The hardware is on the road, in the cars themselves. The hardware to use it at home isn’t in most owners’ garages. To send power from a GM EV back into a house, an owner has to buy the GM Energy PowerShift Charger and a V2H Enablement Kit, a system that WIRED reports costs $20,000 up front. The kit has to be installed by a qualified electrician, and the home’s wiring has to handle the back-feed.

GM says homeowners generally earn that $20,000 back through utility bill credits over “five or so years” of use, WIRED reported. The math depends on a local utility that pays the owner for grid-discharge credits, which is the missing piece in most ZIP codes. GM has been selling the V2H bundle for years through its GM Energy subsidiary, set up in 2022. Customers number only in the “thousands,” the company told WIRED, and a spokesperson declined to share a more specific count. The 250,000-vehicle capable fleet is the demand the V2H program hasn’t yet matched.

The numbers define the gap: a quarter-million capable vehicles, thousands of installed systems, and a small subset actually feeding a grid. The remaining work is to close the spread between the first number and the last.

The bottleneck sits somewhere else: in the patchwork of local rules. The bidirectional capability is in the cars already; the question is what the local utility lets the car do with it. The software update this week makes the grid-facing side smoother to operate; it doesn’t, by itself, create the buyer or the rate.

Two New Utility Partnerships, Plus Dozens in the Pipeline

GM announced two new pilots at the Empower event on Tuesday. The first is a 30-household stress test of bidirectional capability in Michigan, run with DTE Energy, the state’s largest utility. The second is a 2030 target to enroll over 52,000 GM EVs in PG&E’s Northern California grid-balancing protocols, out of a projected local fleet of 130,000 GM EVs. Both are early, and both are small relative to the 250,000-vehicle capable fleet already on US roads.

Both pilots are small relative to the 250,000-vehicle capable fleet. The DTE test is a pilot within a pilot: 30 GM employees in the Detroit area running the system every day, with DTE reading the data. The PG&E target is the more ambitious number. PG&E says the goal is to enroll over 52,000 GM households in grid-balancing protocols by 2030, a figure that lands inside GM’s larger projection of 130,000 operational GM EVs in the territory by the same year. GM has “worked out dozens” of similar utility partnerships that haven’t yet been announced, WIRED reports.

The 30-household pilot can be stood up in a quarter. The 52,000-EV program is a five-year buildout that requires rate cases, hardware standards, and customer acquisition.

Why the Grid, Not the Garage, Is the Bottleneck

The story sits downstream of the cars, in the roughly 3,000 utilities that sit between the cars and the grid, WIRED reports. Each one writes its own rate schedules, sets its own interconnection rules, and decides whether the owner’s kilowatt-hour back-feed is a credit, a service, or a regulatory fight. The 250,000 capable vehicles are split across all of them, and almost none have the program needed.

Washington state’s Puget Sound Energy, which announced its own bidirectional pilot on March 18, makes the operational picture concrete. PSE is running what it calls the Pacific Northwest’s first V2H demonstration, with Ford F-150 Lightning and Kia EV9 owners in the first wave. The program is testing two use cases: time-of-use optimization, where the EV discharges to the home during the daily peak-pricing window, and demand response, where PSE calls on the parked vehicles to ease grid stress during high-demand periods. Initial enrollment is limited to PSE employees; the utility says it hopes to open the program to broader customer participation as soon as 2027.

This initiative illustrates the importance of collaboration between academia and industry. Real-world deployment of bidirectional charging is essential for gathering the data, and the technical and customer adaptation insights needed to scale V2H deployment across the grid.

Scott Samuelsen, a UC Irvine professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and founding director of the university’s Advanced Power and Energy Program, said in a research announcement last October.

The Menifee, California, deployment Samuelsen is overseeing, six homes wired to Kia EV9 SUVs and Wallbox Quasar 2 chargers, is now in a two-year evaluation. It’s the first mass-market V2H demonstration in the United States, the APEP team said. The academic pilot is the operational template that utilities, automakers, and regulators all need before they sign the kind of 52,000-EV agreement GM is betting on.

The two-year study is the kind of timeline that explains why GM’s 2030 target is ambitious, not conservative. UC Irvine’s team took several years of collaboration with Kia and Hyundai to get six homes running, WIRED reports. The project director, Scott Samuelsen, told WIRED that utilities around the country are “just beginning to address this.” PSE’s product manager, Clint Stewart, calls himself a “techno-optimist” on the technology’s eventual scale, and forecasts five years before the picture is “relatively figured out.” The 52,000-EV PG&E target lands inside that window; the 250,000 capable GM EVs on the road today are a much larger number, all waiting on the same window to open.

What GM Is Actually Building

The wire GM is trying to thread is older than this week’s software update. WIRED reports the company is leaning on bidirectional charging to answer the “bigger and maybe even existential question” of “how do we make a car more valuable?” GM’s announcements from the Empower 2026 event spell out the rest of the answer.

The auto giant is also building the grid side, in parallel. The Empower event unveiled a partnership with Peak Energy to develop sodium-ion chemistry built for stationary storage, where longevity and cost-per-cycle matter more than range and weight. The same event confirmed a deeper push with Redwood Materials: roughly 100 repurposed battery packs deployed at one of GM’s Michigan plants, providing 1.5 megawatts of dispatchable energy to the site, in a deal expected to save more than $3 million in local electricity costs over the installation’s lifetime. GM also said it’s the first automaker working with Redwood to recycle scrap and damaged batteries from its own manufacturing lines. Wade Sheffer, GM Energy’s vice president, said the moment calls for reshaping how drivers interact with their vehicles and “turn them into something more than just transportation,” WIRED reported. The first-mover claim is the kind that travels: it positions GM as an energy company as much as a car company, and it does so before the bidirectional fleet has paid back a single customer’s $20,000 install.

The strategic frame GM is selling is the EV-as-power-plant business case. The operational reality is thousands of GM Energy customers, a national utility patchwork, and 3,000 separate rate cases to win. On GM’s own 2030 PG&E timeline, the four years between now and 2030 is when the gap has to close.

• 250,000+ GM EVs on US roads with bidirectional capability (per GM).
• 12 GM EV models equipped with bidirectional hardware (per WIRED).
• $20,000 up-front cost of the GM Energy PowerShift Charger and V2H Enablement Kit (per WIRED).
• 52,000+ GM EVs PG&E aims to enroll in grid-balancing protocols by 2030 (per GM and PG&E).
• ~3,000 US electric utilities, almost all of which must individually approve bidirectional equipment and design rate programs (per WIRED).

Frequently Asked Questions

What is bidirectional EV charging?

Bidirectional EV charging is the ability of an electric vehicle’s battery to send electricity back out, not just take it in. For GM, the capability is built into 12 of its electric models, including the Chevrolet Equinox EV, GMC Sierra EV, and Cadillac LYRIQ. The two main uses are vehicle-to-home backup power and vehicle-to-grid feed-in, where the parked car discharges into the local network. The hardware is built into the cars; the rate programs that pay for the feed-in have to be built per utility.

How much does it cost to use a GM EV to power a house?

Owners need the GM Energy PowerShift Charger and a V2H Enablement Kit, a system that WIRED reports costs about $20,000 up front. The system has to be installed by a qualified electrician, and the home’s wiring has to handle the back-feed. GM says homeowners generally earn that $20,000 back through utility bill credits over “five or so years” of use, WIRED reported, though the math only works in ZIP codes with the right rate program.

How many GM EVs can already do this?

GM says more than 250,000 of its EVs on US roads are now bidirectional-capable, including 12 models. GM Energy, the four-year-old subsidiary that sells the V2H hardware, told WIRED its customer base is in the “thousands,” and the company declined to share a more specific count. The gap is the story in one number: a quarter-million capable vehicles, thousands of installed systems, and a smaller subset actually feeding a grid.

When will vehicle-to-grid be widely available?

PSE’s product manager Clint Stewart told WIRED he would “like to believe that in five years, we’ll be at a point where it’s relatively figured out.” UC Irvine’s Scott Samuelsen, who is running a V2H pilot in six Southern California homes, said utilities are “just beginning to address this.” GM’s own 52,000-EV target on PG&E’s grid is set for 2030.

Why are utilities the bottleneck?

Almost all of the roughly 3,000 US electric utilities have to individually approve the hardware, write a rate program, and decide whether to pay owners for the power their cars feed back. Washington state’s PSE launched its V2H pilot in March 2026 but is initially limiting enrollment to its own employees. PSE says it hopes to open the program to broader customer participation in 2027. The friction is paperwork and rate design, not the cars.