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Have you been thinking about getting an electric vehicle? It may be time to put your foot on the accelerator.
On July 4, President Donald Trump signed the “Big, Beautiful Bill” — and thus hastened the expiration date for tax credits that knock thousands of dollars off the price of an EV.
Under former President Joe Biden’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act, these incentives would have lasted another seven years. They’ll now sunset in just a few months, on Sept. 30.
That leaves a small window of opportunity for shoppers willing to move fast.
“There are just so many benefits to driving an EV, and we encourage people to take advantage of the tax credits while they’re here,” said Ingrid Malmgren, senior policy director at the nonprofit EV advocacy organization Plug In America.
Getting an EV is one of the best ways to reduce your planet-warming pollution — on par with or better than replacing your fossil-fueled heating with a heat pump. And though they tend to cost more up front than cars that guzzle gasoline, EVs have many advantages. For starters, they provide a smoother, quieter driving experience. They also eliminate trips to the gas station and cost less to operate and maintain, pointed out Sara Baldwin, senior director of the electrification policy team at think tank Energy Innovation. A 2023 analysis by the nonpartisan group found that in every state, it’s cheaper to charge all EV models than to fill up their gas-powered counterparts.
Here’s a rundown of the incentives that are available until the end of September:
The New Clean Vehicle Credit (30D) can get you $7,500 off your federal tax bill for a brand-new, qualifying EV model that meets strict requirements around where it’s assembled and where the battery bits come from, for example. Fueleconomy.gov has a list, and dealers should be able to flag eligible vehicles. In addition, your household must earn less than $300,000 for married couples filing jointly, or $150,000 for single filers. You can get the discount right when you make your purchase.
The Used Clean Vehicle Credit (25E) can lop up to $4,000 off your federal tax bill for qualifying pre-owned EVs. The income thresholds are half of those for 30D: $150,000 for married couples filing jointly and $75,000 for single filers. You can get the discount at the point of sale.
The Commercial Clean Vehicle Credit (45W) of up to $7,500 can’t be claimed by consumers, but it benefits them anyway. Auto dealers can take the federal tax credit themselves, passing on the savings to leasing customers. Also affectionately dubbed the EV “leasing loophole,” the credit can be used for vehicles that don’t meet the stringent requirements to claim 30D.
Plus, there’s one more relevant credit that has a slightly longer lead time:
The Alternative Fuel Vehicle Refueling Property Credit (30C) provides up to $1,000 off your federal tax bill to install qualified EV charging equipment if you live in an eligible area. This credit doesn’t expire until June 30, 2026.
“The tax credits have been really powerful at helping to drive EV adoption and to make EVs more accessible to lower- and moderate-income families,” Malmgren said.
Once they’re gone, experts are expecting the growth of the EV market to slow — but not stop — under the Trump administration.
The loss of the tax credits is compounded by other headwinds from the federal government, which has imposed ever-shifting tariffs, frozen funding to build out a network of EV chargers, and revoked California’s authority to set its own vehicle emissions standards. Before Congress stripped California of that autonomy, BloombergNEF had forecast that EVs would make up just 27% of car sales in the U.S. in 2030, down from last year’s prediction of 48%. Now, the research firm expects EV sales to fall even lower.
For the next two-and-a-half months that the federal incentives are intact, automakers and dealers could drop prices to try to move their inventory more aggressively, said Loren McDonald, chief analyst at EV and charging data firm Paren.
Fueled by the tax credits, the EV market has already had a steady drumbeat of some “amazingly low lease prices,” Malmgren noted. For example, in July, the 2024 Fiat 500e and the 2025 Toyota bZ4X, an all-electric SUV, are both on offer for $179 per month, InsideEVs reports.
Customers could see more deals like these if sellers anticipate a slump in consumer interest once the tax credits expire. However, discount offers are likely to be patchy, with the most popular models maintaining higher price points if demand for them outstrips supply, McDonald said.
In the used-EV sector, the $4,000 credit can make an especially big difference; some used EVs are priced as low as $15,000 or $20,000 to begin with.
“The used EV market is quietly on fire,” said Liz Najman, director of market insights at Recurrent, a company that aggregates data on battery health from tens of thousands of EVs across the United States. Used EVs are selling faster than at any point since COVID, she added.
Check out Recurrent’s guide to shopping for used EVs and Plug In America’s PlugStar.com, a brand-neutral resource to help people find the vehicle that’s right for them. Type in your ZIP code, and the site shows you local EV incentives.
Have specific features you want in your vehicle? Find a match for your needs — including range, seating, four-wheel-drive, and more — with Plug In America’s virtual shopping assistant. The tool can connect you to dealers registered with the IRS to provide federal EV tax credits.
“Given all the changes going on, try to find a dealer that offers the point-of-sale rebate,” Najman said, so you don’t have to worry about claiming it yourself next tax season. “Work with a dealer who has IRS credentials, who can show you on the spot that they’re logging in and the car is qualified.”
If you run into trouble in your EV search, you can reach out to Plug In America; the nonprofit offers free one-on-one support for prospective and current EV drivers.
And don’t forget to land on your charging strategy — at home, work, or a public station. If you decide to get a charger, install it before you bring your EV home for ultimate convenience.
“The clock is now ticking on the federal tax incentives for new, used, and leased EVs,” Najman said. “The sooner you start looking, the better.”
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
Sixteen states, the District of Columbia, and more than a half dozen environmental groups have alleged in a lawsuit that the Trump administration has indefinitely and unlawfully frozen funds for a nationwide electric vehicle program.
The complaint was filed on Thursday last week in U.S. District Court in Seattle. Plaintiffs’ attorneys are asking the judge to require the Trump administration to unfreeze the funds and distribute them to the states according to a formula established by Congress.
During the Biden administration, Congress appropriated $5 billion for the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, also known as NEVI, as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021. The money would have been disbursed each year to all 50 states, plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, to build a nationwide network of electric vehicle charging stations along designated Alternative Fuel Corridors.
“Transportation is the leading source of climate pollution in the U.S., and halting the NEVI program directly threatens our progress toward clean, reliable transportation options — especially in the Southeast, where EV infrastructure is still catching up,” said Megan Kimball, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. “In rural and urban areas alike, more charging access means cleaner air, economic growth, and real savings for families. We’re defending that future.”
The legal challenge coincided with a Government Accountability Office report published Thursday that found the U.S. Department of Transportation is unauthorized to withhold the congressionally appropriated funds. The Transportation Department could petition Congress to pass a law to rescind the funds or change the NEVI program, the GAO wrote, but it can’t act unilaterally.
A department spokesperson said in a prepared statement that the GAO report “shows a complete misunderstanding of the law” and “conflicts with Congress’ intent.”
Less than three weeks after Trump was elected to a second term, the Transportation Department ordered states to stop distributing their funds for fiscal years 2022-2025, worth about $2.7 billion. States could reimburse contractors for money already spent, but no new funding could be obligated.
DOT justified the funding freeze by saying the Federal Highway Administration was “updating the NEVI Formula Program Guidance to align with current policy and priorities.”
The GAO report concluded that the Transportation Department erroneously froze funding when it determined that funding was available only for signed project agreements. Instead, the GAO wrote, the effective date for funding was much earlier: when the law made money for the program available for obligation.
Some agencies delay their funding distribution while trying to comply with legal requirements for a program, the GAO wrote. In the NEVI case, however, DOT imposed requirements that exceed what the law prescribes. For example, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act requires states to submit plans to DOT, but does not provide authority for the secretary of transportation to approve or disapprove such plans.
A DOT spokesperson said the GAO was “cherry-picking language in the program statute.”
The agency is updating NEVI program guidance, according to the spokesperson, “because the implementation of NEVI has failed miserably, and DOT will continue to work in good faith to update the program so it can be utilized more efficiently and effectively.”
Attorneys for the environmental groups — including CleanAIRE NC, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, West End Revitalization Project, Sierra Club, and the Natural Resources Defense Council — wrote that in blocking the distribution of funds, the Trump administration directly defied congressional directives.
The funding freeze nullified more than 150 state implementation plans, according to court documents, which harmed local communities. NEVI requires EV charging stations in the first phase to be installed every 50 miles along the federally approved Alternative Fuel Corridors, and that they be within one mile of those routes.
“By reducing access to reliable public charging,” the plaintiffs’ attorneys wrote, “DOT and the FHWA are restricting electric vehicle owners’ ability to travel and use their EVs, increase their fuel costs, delay EV purchases, worsen health impacts from vehicle pollution, and deprive communities of promised public investment.”
In the Charlotte, North Carolina, metro area, for example, air quality — such as levels of ozone and particulate matter — has worsened, according to the 2025 American Lung Association State of the Air Report. The largest city in North Carolina, Charlotte is ringed and bisected by several highways clogged with cars.
“Tailpipe pollution is a public health crisis — fueling asthma, heart disease, and respiratory illness in communities already overburdened by environmental harm,” Jeff Robbins, executive director of CleanAIRE NC, said in a prepared statement. “NEVI is a vital step toward reducing that harm through zero-emission transportation. Freezing the program blocks progress and keeps our most vulnerable residents breathing dirty air. Clean air and climate justice cannot be put on hold.”
Interstate 85 and U.S. Highway 70 run through many underserved communities in Alamance County, North Carolina, about 30 miles west of Durham.
“For decades, communities like ours in Alamance County have been denied access to basic infrastructure,” said Omega Wilson, codirector of the West End Revitalization Association. “The NEVI program offers a real chance to change that — with public investment in EV charging that finally includes rural Black and brown neighborhoods. Suspending the program delays critical investments, widens infrastructure disparities, and sends the message that once again, the taxpayers who’ve been left behind the longest will be the last to benefit.”
Brooke Canova was nervous after she and her husband bought their Ford F-150 Lightning, the electric version of the enormous, classic pickup truck.
She wasn’t worried about running out of charge and being stranded on the road, or whether the truck would have enough oomph to merge onto a speeding highway. Canova, a health and physical education teacher and mother of a preteen son in Charlottesville, Virginia, fretted about the vehicle’s size.
“I’m not going to be able to drive this!” she recalled thinking. “It’s too big. How will I park it?”
The purchase was a sort of compromise: Her husband had long wanted a truck, and she finally agreed to go along if it was electric.
As it turns out, the vehicle has enough cameras to help Canova manage its girth. It can parallel park itself in self-driving mode. What’s more, she can drive to Richmond, Virginia, and back on one 320-mile charge. And since her rooftop is equipped with 27 solar panels, it costs her family less than $6 a month to charge the truck at home.
“It has been a lot of fun,” Canova said, especially as a woman driving a big truck that’s electric to boot. “It’s sort of a conversation piece. People are like, ‘Wow, look at you in that thing!’”
That’s just the reaction Generation180 is hoping to provoke. Headquartered in Charlottesville, the nonprofit has recruited Canova and some 7,000 other “EV ambassadors” nationwide to spread the word about their experiences online and in person.
While the group supports policies to speed the clean energy transition, its core mission is to “inspire and equip” people to adopt clean energy in their own lives, said Executive Director Stuart Gardner. EV ownership, he said, is a vital “stepping stone” to other clean energy actions.
Gardner’s team has long encouraged people to drive electric. But last year, their research found remarkable gender disparities among the “EV curious” in Virginia. Women said helping the environment was a top reason to drive electric, tied with saving money. Yet just a quarter of women had heard “a lot” about EVs, compared to nearly half of men.
The Virginia survey was backed up by other studies, which showed just 30% of women had some familiarity with EVs, compared to over half of men. In all, more than 70% of EV owners are men.
“There was an obvious disconnect, Gardner said. The “I’ll Drive What She’s Driving” campaign, now in its second year, was born.
The initiative is focused on reaching women in the suburbs — auto-dependent areas where electric vehicles are ideal for short trips and where many new-car buyers live, said Gardner. Suburbs also “tend to be evenly split Democrat and Republican,” he said, “So, they [offer] a great opportunity to say, ‘Hey, EVs are for everyone.’”
At the crux of the effort is the belief that people in general and women in particular are skeptical of the increasingly polarized information landscape and are looking for reliable messengers.
The women EV owners Generation180 has identified did a lot of research first, said Shakaya Cooper, program manager with the group. Much of that homework involved talking to friends and colleagues, she said. “They’re intentional in their research, and they are going to people that are trusted sources, for sure.”
That’s where volunteer ambassadors like Canova come in. Last fall, she brought her F-150 Lightning to a car show tied to a downtown Charlottesville event, where various EV makes and models were on display. A graduate of the University of Virginia, she’s also attended college basketball games with a suite of other women to talk about going electric.
“It was just a really nice vibe — talking to people about their cars, what they like, what they don’t like,” she said, having “those really approachable conversations between moms.”
Beyond official functions organized by Generation180, Canova and her family undoubtedly pique EV curiosity in their community by milking all the Lightning’s bells and whistles in their daily lives.
One popular feature is the “frunk,” a trunk in the front where a combustion engine would normally go. With a drainage hole and light insulation, it can act as a cooler. Plus, the entire vehicle is equipped with outlets — making it perfect for tailgating.
“One of our favorite things to do with the truck is tailgate because we plug in an [electric] pellet grill and a griddle and a TV — all into the truck bed, which has been a lot of fun,” she said. “We tailgated for a Little League game the other day; the whole team was there.”
After a year with the Lightning, Canova and her husband were so sold on driving electric that when her treasured Ford Escape perished last summer, she replaced it with a used Tesla. “We haven’t really encountered any moments where we’ve been desperate to have a gas vehicle,” she said. “We’re all in.”
Some 340 miles south of Charlottesville in Bostic, a tiny town in the North Carolina foothills between Charlotte and Asheville, Terri Watts and her husband are equally thrilled with their EV but for very different reasons.
As the owners of a high-end chauffeur service, they use their fleet of 17 premium vehicles to transport customers to wine and beer tours, weddings, and scenic vistas in this tourist-heavy corner of the state. One of their most popular rides is a Rivian, especially among clients who have their own EV at home and are committed to a low-carbon lifestyle.
“It’s another offering that fits what some people are looking for,” said Watts, who is also a Generation180 EV ambassador. “I think it allows us to maybe get more business. There are people who, unless [they can get] an electric vehicle, they’re not interested.”
From a financial perspective, the Rivian is a no-brainer. The couple paid tens of thousands of dollars less for it than their other luxury vans, and its operating costs are much lower. There are no oil changes, and they can fully charge it overnight at their house for $15. If a driver needs to use a public fast charger, the price might run as high as $45. By contrast, filling up one of their conventional SUVs with premium fuel runs between $55 and $75.
The Rivian’s style and performance has also won converts. “It’s really nice. It’s very roomy on the inside,” Watts said. “It’s got the speed that you can’t beat.”
One recent weekend, she added, a pair of women had wanted a sedan for their sightseeing tour, but it was booked. They rented the Rivian instead and enjoyed it so much they reserved it again for the next day of their trip. “They were super impressed,” Watts said.
In addition to having person-to-person conversations about their EVs, scores of women including Watts and Canova have blogged about their experiences for Generation180. The group has also identified social media influencers who’ve rented EVs and posted about activities ranging from the novel to the mundane, like charging at the shopping center while buying groceries.
“The individuals have been moms, families, single women,” Cooper said, “just sharing, ‘I could go hiking in the rural part of North Carolina or in a rural part of Virginia and still be able to charge.’”
Cooper and other advocates acknowledge that long road trips in EVs still require more planning than those in conventional gas-powered vehicles. And the price of entry to drive electric, while falling, is still too high for many.
Lawmakers in both Richmond and Washington, D.C., have sought in recent years to alleviate these barriers to EV adoption. Biden-era tax credits for new and used electric vehicles lower upfront costs. A nationwide commitment to charging infrastructure, especially in rural areas, is critical for peace of mind on long road trips.
In Virginia, state lawmakers created an electric vehicle rebate program four years ago but have yet to fund it. In a move most observers say is illegal, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin last year announced Virginia won’t follow a 2021 state law that commits it to standards set by California’s Clean Cars program — which requires automakers to sell more electric cars in the coming years.
At the federal level, the Trump administration has frozen billions of dollars for states to build charging stations, also likely in violation of the law. Just before the Memorial Day weekend, House Republicans muscled through a massive tax bill that, in addition to dealing other blows to clean energy, would end the electric vehicle tax credits and charge EV drivers new fees. The legislation is now in the hands of the Senate, which could make changes.
“It’s really unfortunate. It really hurts the more rapid adoption of electric vehicles,” said Gardner, who says the credits and rebates should be preserved. But, he added, the turbulence in Washington reinforces the value of his group’s “I’ll Drive What She’s Driving” campaign.
“We’re seeing now that policy can be very fragile,” he said. “But trusted messengers and the clean energy constituencies that we’re building — those have real staying power.”
A correction was made on May 27, 2025: The caption for the first image in this story originally misidentified Brooke Canova as the person on the right. Canova is on the left.
Despite challenges in key markets like the U.S., the global shift to battery-powered vehicles is moving along.
Last year, more than one in five new cars sold worldwide were either fully electric or a plug-in hybrid vehicle (PHEV), per a new International Energy Agency report. This year, EVs and PHEVs will make up more than one-quarter of new car sales, IEA forecasts.
China, the world leader in EV and battery manufacturing, continues to also lead the way on EV adoption. A total of over 17 million fully electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles were sold around the world last year — and more than 11 million of those were in China alone. PHEVs are growing particularly fast in China. The country saw nearly double the number of PHEVs hit the road in 2024 as it did in 2023. Almost half of all cars sold in China last year were EVs or PHEVs.
Europe is the next-biggest region for electric vehicle adoption, but it stagnated a bit last year. Roughly the same number of EVs and PHEVs were sold across the continent as in 2023. Growth has tapered off in large part because large European countries like France and Germany have phased out EV subsidies in recent years. Still, sales grew last year in over half of the European Union’s 27 member states — and they climbed significantly in the United Kingdom, the second-largest auto market in Europe.
The U.S. electric vehicle market saw modest growth in 2024. About 10% more EVs and PHEVs took to the road in the U.S. than in the year before, a marked slowdown from 2023’s growth rate but not a bad outcome given some of the apocalyptic forecasts from analysts. It’s notable that the sector saw growth despite Tesla, the dominant player in the U.S. EV landscape, recording a decline in sales.
EV sales in 2024 were also bolstered by emerging markets, where over 60% more EVs and PHEVs were sold than in 2023. India and Thailand are among the largest markets in this category, though they were far from the fastest growing — meanwhile, Brazil, Vietnam, and Indonesia all saw a rapid rise in EV sales.
The outlook for this year is solid. The IEA expects more than 20 million EVs and PHEVs to be sold worldwide as China keeps expanding its massive EV fleet. Sales in Europe could rebound a bit as new policies incentivizing EVs go into effect. EV adoption in emerging markets will continue to grow on the strength of increasingly affordable Chinese models.
The biggest question mark is the U.S., where tariffs, policy rollbacks, and the likely repeal of the consumer EV tax credit — and possibly manufacturing incentives, too — could seriously dampen adoption of electrified models. But even if the worst case for EV adoption unfolds in the U.S., it’s just one country. The rest of the world, meanwhile, will keep on moving toward EVs.
Road transport is responsible for around three-quarters of global carbon dioxide emissions from transport. Switching from petrol and diesel to electric vehicles is an important solution to decarbonize our economies.
This chart shows the change in share of new cars that were electric in China, the European Union (EU), and the United States (US) between 2020 and 2023. This includes fully electric and plug-in hybrid cars, though most are fully electric.
In 2020, electric cars were rare everywhere. But by 2023, over one-third of new vehicles in China were electric, compared to less than a quarter in the EU and under a tenth in the US.
While we only have annual data up to 2023, preliminary figures suggest that in 2024, electric cars outsold conventional ones for the first time in China.
Explore data on electric car sales for more countries →
It’s a tough time for electric trucking in the U.S. The Trump administration has cut off funding for heavy-duty vehicle charging and port infrastructure. Republicans in Congress are trying to rescind states’ authority to set clean vehicle mandates. And tariffs are throttling incoming cargoes to U.S. ports, hampering the business of trucking as a whole while likely also driving up the already-high price of battery-powered trucks.
But in Southern California, the transition away from diesel trucks, which emit a disproportionate share of the transportation sector’s planet-warming and health-harming emissions, is moving forward despite federal policy obstacles. Two big all-electric charging depots opened in April to serve clean trucks operating in the region, which is home to the busiest seaport complex in the country and is the epicenter of U.S. electric truck adoption.
The first, located in Rancho Dominguez, 12 miles north of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, is owned and operated by Terawatt Infrastructure, a startup with more than $1 billion in capital and that is working with a consortium of companies including Ikea, Maersk, Microsoft, and PepsiCo. With 7 megawatts of capacity at 20 fast-charging stalls, it can charge up to 125 trucks per day.
The second site is in Colton, a city about 60 miles east of Los Angeles in California’s Inland Empire, a region crowded with massive distribution warehouses. That site is owned and operated by Greenlane, a more than $650 million joint venture of Daimler Truck North America, utility NextEra Energy, and investment firm BlackRock Alternatives. It has 12 pull-through sites for trucks hauling trailers, which are equipped with 400-kilowatt dual-port chargers, along with 29 “bobtail” lanes — sites for trucks without attached trailers — equipped with 180-kW chargers. In total, it can support just over 10 megawatts of charging.
These facilities are the latest in a line of big truck-charging depots springing up across California, built by major firms like Amazon and PepsiCo, freight companies such as NFI Industries and Schneider National, logistics operators like Prologis, and startups including Forum Mobility, Voltera, and WattEV. This proliferation is in response to the state’s ambitious truck electrification goals, which include a target for completely zero-emissions fleets by 2045, and to the the hefty incentives it has put in place to accomplish that.
Terawatt’s and Greenlane’s newly opened electric truck stops represent a new class of charging site meant to serve the next phase in the Southern California electric truck charging evolution.
Early truck-charging sites were designed to serve shorter-range trucks that deliver goods from a central warehouse before returning to recharge overnight. But Terawatt’s and Greenlane’s new depots are meant to function more like a classic highway stop for battery-powered trucks looking to deliver goods hundreds of miles away.
The new stations will support more routes per day from Southern California’s crowded ports to its distribution warehouses further inland, said Emilia Sibley, lead of Terawatt’s heavy-duty business unit. Terawatt’s newly opened site, which serves the trucks of customers ranging from relatively small freight haulers like Hight Logistics to global corporates like PepsiCo, is “meant to be an enabler for on-the-go charging,” she said — a place to get a “top-off charge to get from the port to the Inland Empire multiple times per day, rather than once a day.”
This infrastructure will allow truck owners to “extend the range and economics of these heavy-duty assets,” she said. Owners and operators measure the value of trucks not just on up-front price and long-term operating cost, but on the revenue the vehicles generate over their useful life. Being able to run two trips per day instead of one could essentially double a truck’s value.
The same dynamic applies to electric trucks looking for a recharge at the end of delivery routes in the farther reaches of the Inland Empire, said Andrea Pratt, Greenlane’s vice president of government and utility relations. Unlike most truck-charging depots today, Greenlane’s Colton site is open to any electric truck, in the traditional “truck stop–type model,” she said. “We are publicly facing, and we will always have charging available for trucks to come up and charge ad hoc.”
These big new charging depots are also the launchpads for a broader eastward expansion of truck-charging capacity. Greenlane’s Colton site is the first of a string of electric truck stops being planned from Long Beach to the Mojave Desert cities of Barstow and Baker as part of its I-15 commercial EV charging corridor project. And Terawatt and its partners are planning several large-scale charging sites along the I-10 highway from California to Texas.
The routes and use cases open to electric trucks will further expand as the next generation of longer-range trucks from mainstream manufacturers and those from all-electric specialists like Tesla or Windrose Technology become available, Pratt said. Tesla said this week that full-scale production of its long-delayed Semi will begin in 2026.
“As battery technology increases and as prices come down, you’re really going to see a change in the market,” Pratt said.
Both Greenlane’s and Terawatt’s new charging depots also offer fancier versions of the typical truck stop amenities, such as a lounge area with food and drink for sale, restrooms, free Wi-Fi, and round-the-clock security and customer support. Those are important both for on-the-go truckers spending a half hour to an hour to top up their batteries for the next leg of their journey and for trucks reserving bobtail spots to recharge overnight.
“Sites like ours can really de-risk the zero-emissions vehicle journey,” Pratt said, particularly for the vast majority of U.S. trucking fleets that own 10 or fewer trucks. “You may be less likely to need to put down a lot of capital to electrify your property if there’s a Greenlane or a Terawatt or a Forum down the street — and there will be someone there if something’s gone wrong.”
This build-it-and-they-will-come approach to electric trucking comes with its fair share of financial risk — particularly in the shadow of the second Trump administration.
The administration has frozen or restricted billions of dollars in grant funding authorized by Congress in the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Those actions have left states and companies uncertain about whether they can rely on billions of federal dollars for building charging infrastructure on major transit corridors and for projects to invest in clean ports.
The Trump administration also plans to roll back federal transportation emissions regulations and has made clear it won’t support states’ efforts to put more stringent emissions mandates into effect. In January, California withdrew its plans to seek federal approval of its Advanced Clean Fleets mandate, which set statewide zero-emissions truck purchasing quotas on most large truck fleets.
Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress have introduced resolutions seeking to rescind federal waivers that allow California and 10 other states to impose Advanced Clean Trucks mandates, which require manufacturers to sell increasing numbers of zero-emissions trucks. That move comes despite findings from the Government Accountability Office and the Senate parliamentarian that Congress lacks the legal standing to take these actions.
Economic troubles are compounding the regulatory uncertainty. President Donald Trump’s crushingly high tariffs imposed on China have led to a major reduction in cargo being shipped to U.S. ports, including the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. That dropoff is almost certain to cause a slowdown in business for freight companies, making it less likely they will look to buy any new trucks — electric or diesel.
Those tariffs will also drive up the cost of lithium-ion batteries, most of which are made in China today. Battery costs are the biggest reason why electric trucks remain two to three times more expensive up front than diesel trucks in U.S. markets.
These headwinds further complicate the inherently uncertain economics of electric truck charging. Companies like Greenlane and Terawatt do have some levers to pull to secure demand for the charging infrastructure they’re building, however.
While Greenlane is opening its Colton chargers to all users, “that doesn’t mean we don’t have customers,” Pratt said. Last week’s ribbon-cutting featured one major anchor customer — Nevoya, a startup that’s renting office space at the site and is pledging to use it to charge up to 100 electric trucks it plans to bring onto Southern California roads.
Nevoya cofounder and Chief Commercial Officer John Verdon said the startup is working directly with “shipping customers looking to achieve sustainability goals.”
“We hire the drivers, acquire the trucks and trailers, and charge the trucks,” he said. “There are lanes where we are price-competitive with diesel — and in those markets we’re very aggressive.” But other markets are “quite candidly not price-competitive” due to challenges around charger availability and vehicle range and price.
It will take some careful planning to expand charging at the proper pace and scale to match the trucking industry’s demand for electrifying its fleet. “We’re building these things with a lot of intention and strategy behind it,” Pratt said, using such inputs as the telematics data from Daimler trucks to understand where route lengths and freight volumes allow electric trucks to compete, and how much charging is needed at which sites to support that.
“At the end of the day, for fleets, it’s all about dollars and cents and making the economics work,” she said. That puts pressure on states like California that want to keep growing the clean freight sector to keep up support, she said.
California has been a leader on incentives to expand electric trucks, she noted. The state’s Hybrid and Zero-Emission Truck and Bus Voucher Incentive Project offers lucrative financial support to defray the up-front cost of electric trucks, which cost less to fuel and maintain over their lifetimes than diesel-fueled trucks.
”These are really small margins that companies are running their trucks on,” Pratt said. “If we want a long-term viable market, we need carrots and sticks — and maybe more carrots than sticks in the beginning.”
California is a trendsetter when it comes to cleaning up transportation. But the Republican-controlled Congress is trying to put an end to that, albeit through dubious legal means.
For years, the state’s various clean vehicle rules have gone well beyond federal emissions standards. Its Advanced Clean Cars II program requires that all new passenger cars sold in the state must be zero-emissions by 2035; Advanced Clean Trucks mandates that manufacturers scale up their sales of zero-emissions medium- and heavy-duty vehicles.
Eleven other states and Washington, D.C., have adopted California’s latest zero-emissions cars rules, and 10 have adopted its Advanced Clean Trucks regulations.
But to be enforceable, those rules needed waivers from the U.S. EPA. The waivers are what the U.S. House targeted this week, voting on Wednesday to repeal Advanced Clean Trucks and on Thursday to rescind Advanced Clean Cars II, with support from major automakers. The House votes came even after the Government Accountability Office — the nation’s top legislative auditor — said Congress doesn’t have the authority to revoke the waivers via the Congressional Review Act. The repeals still face an uphill battle in the Senate, where the body’s parliamentarian similarly said the waivers aren’t subject to such congressional oversight.
But advocates in some of the states that have followed California’s lead don’t want to let the potential repeal derail their EV progress.
More than 60 environmental, business, and housing groups sent letters to Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey last week, calling on her to preserve the state’s EV goals. Healey has already postponed enforcement of similar rules encouraging zero-emissions medium- and heavy-duty vehicle sales last month, but this coalition says the remaining regulations are critical to meeting the state’s net-zero goals, Canary Media’s Sarah Shemkus reports.
Illinois advocates are meanwhile still pushing their state to adopt Advanced Clean Trucks and Advanced Clean Cars II, they told Canary Media’s Kari Lydersen last month. Places like Joliet and Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood have become overrun with heavy-duty trucks as warehouses crop up, bringing excessive diesel pollution with them. Replacing those trucks with zero-emissions vehicles would improve air quality, especially in frontline communities that face higher pollution burdens.
Back in California, concrete progress on electrifying heavy-duty trucks is still happening, Canary Media’s Jeff St. John reports. Two all-electric charging depots just opened last month — infrastructure that will allow electric trucking to keep on growing, despite all the potholes ahead.
Community solar is winning over Republicans
Community solar is building a surprising fan base. Republican state lawmakers in Georgia, Iowa, Missouri, and Ohio have sponsored bills this year to encourage construction of solar arrays that multiple households can tap into, Alison Takemura reports for Canary Media. Pairing community solar with agricultural land is even at the heart of a model policy from the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council.
Advocates say community solar is in line with the conservative principles of free markets and individual property rights — and a recent survey out of deep-red Texas seems to agree. The poll, commissioned by Conservative Texans for Energy Innovation, found more than 90% support protecting property owners’ rights to produce electricity on their land, including with wind turbines or solar panels, and say they should be allowed to lease their land out for power generation too.
Could Spain’s massive blackouts happen in the U.S.?
Spain and Portugal suffered one of Europe’s worst power outages ever on Monday. About 55 million people lost power, sidelining hospitals, disrupting cell signals, and halting digital payments. The massive outage on a usually stable grid stirred up accusations — including from U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright — that renewable power was to blame.
Spain’s grid operator hasn’t yet disclosed what caused the outages, but the country’s environmental minister said Wednesday that renewables weren’t responsible. Nearly 55% of Spain’s electricity on Monday came from solar, with another 10% each from wind, nuclear, and hydropower — a similar mix to what’s powered the country’s grid in the past, without problems. Still, experts say the outages highlight stability challenges that renewables can pose during power disruptions, and show that grid operators need to implement new technologies to better manage increasing amounts of wind and solar.
Tesla turmoil: Elon Musk and Tesla’s board chair deny a report suggesting the EV maker is seeking a new CEO amid Musk’s increasing political activity and the company’s sinking finances. (Axios, Wall Street Journal)
Gutting grants: The U.S. EPA indicates in a court filing that it intends to cancel 781 grants issued under the Biden administration, most of them tied to environmental justice, and has already notified about half of those recipients of the looming cuts. (Washington Post)
100 days of climate demolition: President Donald Trump has signed 20 climate-related executive orders in his first 100 days in office, and his term has so far been marked by stock market uncertainty, clean-manufacturing project cancellations, and tariffs that are set to hurt the fossil-fuel industry. (Heatmap)
Burgum’s energy pivot: Now largely focused on oil and gas development, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has taken a sharp turn since supporting an “all of the above” energy strategy that included clean energy while serving as North Dakota’s governor. (E&E News)
A second life for coal plants: Former coal-fired power plants are becoming in-demand properties as developers look to re-use the facilities’ existing power lines for gas-fired power plants, battery storage sites, or offshore wind connections. (Associated Press)
First Solar’s fortunes fall: American manufacturer First Solar, which saw a stock bump in the wake of Trump’s tariffs, has since reported lower-than-expected first quarter earnings and reduced its expected revenue and profit for the rest of the year. (Heatmap)
EV education at risk: Programs that train students to work in EV manufacturing, which arose to supply the growing industry with workers, could peter out amid the Trump administration’s continued attacks on the sector. (Hechinger Report)
Aubrey Gunnels, CEO of 3V Infrastructure, understands the risks involved in installing and owning EV chargers in thousands of apartment building garages and condominium parking lots. She also sees the opportunity.
Just look at the statistics. By 2030, EVs are expected to make up close to half of all new U.S. car sales. Today, roughly 80% of EV charging takes place at home, and roughly one-third of Americans live in multifamily housing. But only 5% of U.S. multifamily housing offers on-site EV charging, according to CBRE, one of the world’s largest property management companies and a 3V Infrastructure partner.
“People really prefer to charge at home,” Gunnels said — and they’ll want to live in apartments or condos that offer that option.
Tenants don’t pay to install EV charging, though — property owners do, and they aren’t in the business of financing, installing, or operating complex EV charging projects.
That’s where 3V Infrastructure comes in, Gunnels said. Since launching last year, the New York–based startup has raised up to $40 million from an affiliate of Greenbacker Capital Management to finance charging installations in properties across the country. With big-name customers like Camden Property Trust and Bridge Investment Group, 3V is installing chargers at hundreds of sites in 17 states, and hopes to expand to thousands by 2030, she said.
Getting big is key to 3V’s business model, Gunnels said. Many “charging-as-a-service” offerings for multifamily properties already cover the cost of chargers in exchange for monthly fees or other payback structures. But 3V isn’t asking property owners for any money at all, she explained — just a 10-year contract to let it build chargers on the site and charge customers for using them.
That means it’s up to 3V to pick the right properties, install the right number of chargers in the right locations, keep them in good working order, and decide how much it needs to charge users to make its money back.
“We’re taking early risk with the EV driver adoption rate at each site,” Gunnels said. “And once we’re profitable, we share the profits with the property owner — and that helps allow us to maintain the chargers.”
In that sense, 3V’s business model more closely resembles that of the public charging operators that rely on electricity sales to earn back their up-front costs. That’s inherently riskier than getting someone to pay you to install and operate EV chargers — and so far it’s a rarity in the world of multifamily EV charging developers.
It is, after all, still early days for the EV charging industry. The first public charger deployments were boosted by significant government or utility incentives to make up for the fact that there weren’t enough EVs on the road to reliably finance their costs.
But up-front incentives aren’t a good mechanism to ensure that chargers keep performing over the long haul. In fact, EV chargers have a long and troubled history of not working when drivers need them to. This is a well-publicized problem with public chargers, but it’s affected multifamily properties as well.
“As we all know, the statistics about EV charger uptime are not great. A lot of those chargers may be not functioning,” said Mark Kerstens, vice president of EV charging solutions at CBRE. That’s certainly true for the earliest rollouts of multifamily charging, many of them undertaken by property owners themselves.
CBRE manages and advises multifamily property owners around the world, and works with a number of chargepoint operators, including 3V, for those looking to install EV charging, Kerstens said. Some property owners have taken on charging installations and operations on their own, he said. But most are simply looking for a way to not be left behind in a market that’s constantly seeking out new amenities to draw in tenants and residents.
How badly property owners feel they need EV chargers depends on where they are and what type of tenant they want to attract, he said. He sees the overall market as shifting to the point where it could be “a negative differentiator, if you’re the only multifamily property that does not have an EV charger.” And for many property owners, “it’s just like a vending machine in the rec room — they don’t want to do it themselves, they’d rather have a service provider.”
CBRE’s EV charging partners run the gamut from all-in risk-takers like 3V to a range of “as-a-service” models that charge monthly fees or arrange cost- and revenue-sharing agreements with property owners, he said. What’s paramount, he said, is that the chargers work properly — and “there’s quite a bad track record for those who’ve tried to do it on their own.”
The same concern applies to charging provided by a third party, said Clark Longhurst, president of commercial markets at SitelogIQ, the company working with 3V on its projects with Bridge Investment Group. SitelogIQ has decades of experience installing LED lighting, building controls, and other energy-efficiency projects in multifamily housing. EV charging is a relatively new addition to that roster — and “there’s a longer list of people who will do it ‘as a service,’” he said.
But EV charging for multifamily properties has had some serious problems. Early projects were plagued by chargers that couldn’t receive wireless control signals in concrete parking garages, low-cost chargers that companies failed to repair promptly when they broke, and other issues, he said.
“I don’t want to hand this over to someone who will provide a bad experience – that’s bad for me as a property owner,” Longhurst said. Any provider of charging as a service “needs to have the same incentives — or maybe more incentives — than you have as an owner to ensure the charging works, that it’s done without friction, and if there’s a problem it’s handled quickly.”
Multifamily property owners also have to consider the risks of taking responsibility for charging infrastructure that could end up being abandoned as companies exit various markets, said Larsen Burack, EV charging product manager at analysis firm Ohm Analytics. His company’s latest report on the U.S. multifamily charging space indicates how many choices exist, from multifamily specialists such as Swtch and EverCharge to large-scale public charging providers like ChargePoint and Tesla. But those choices have also included companies like Enel X Way that abruptly exited the market and stopped supporting customers.
“Options like the 3V model are intriguing for property managers because there is no up-front capital cost and can be seen as relatively low risk,” Burack said. At the same time, “this is still a volatile industry, and if a company shutters, you risk having another Enel X situation on your hands.”
Gunnels conceded that 3V’s customers will need to have faith in its ability to execute on its 10-year contracts. She also highlighted that the company doesn’t rely on government subsidies for its projects to be profitable, and takes a conservative approach to forecasting utilization — the critical metric of how often chargers are used, and thus how quickly they can pay back their costs and earn profits.
That’s important for aligning the long-term incentives of the charging business, she believes. “Many of the stranded chargers we have across the nation are not a product of hardware or software [issues] — it’s really the economics,” she said. “If someone’s not incentivized to make sure the chargers work, they’re not going to work.”
3V’s conservative approach may limit the scope of markets and properties that the company goes after. ”We don’t believe every multifamily building has to have an EV charger in the next five years,” she said, even if most will eventually need them. 3V will also limit how many chargers it installs at each property during its initial deployment phases, as the company tests its utilization forecasts against reality.
The key to success, Gunnels said, is scale and diversity. Each individual project may be relatively small — costing, say, between $30,000 to $100,000 to install up to 14 Level 2 chargers per property.
Luckily for 3V, it’s easier to predict utilization for multifamily properties than roadside and public charging. So said Quinn Pasloske, a managing director of the Greenbacker investment fund that supplied 3V with up to $40 million going into its first round of investments.
“Historically we’ve been very averse to taking utilization risk. This has been the third rail” for investors in the charging sector, he said. Roadside charging, for instance, runs the risk of too few EVs showing up to pay back its up-front or ongoing costs — or the risk that another charging station will open across the street and steal its business.
“But when there’s charging at home, people charge at home,” he said. “Now, all of a sudden, you have captive demand. Even though you are taking utilization risk, you can measure and modulate that so much more carefully.”
To be clear, that dilution of utilization risk works best at large scales, he said.
“You cannot be doing this on a property-by-property basis,” Pasloske said. “You need scale — it needs to be over $100 million, and to get to really attractive costs of capital, over $500 million. And you need a lot of diversification.”
“But once we have scale, the cost of capital comes down dramatically,” he said. That’s because these kinds of projects can be bundled into portfolios and sold as asset-backed securities — a class of investment that can include anything from home mortgages and credit card debt to residential solar projects.
“The market is very good at understanding the risk of distributed assets, even if these assets are high risk,” Pasloske said.
3V’s eventual success relies on achieving that level of scale, Gunnels said. It’s not there yet: “We are using equity to invest in this, so the cost of capital is high. But we have enough data to show that utilization is dependable,” she said — and “we know we have to be at thousands of properties to make this model work.”
The future of the U.S. electric vehicle transition is murky — but at least through the first three months of 2025, the data tells a clear story.
Almost 300,000 EVs were sold in the first quarter of the year, according to a new report from Cox Automotive. That’s 11% more than over the same period in 2024.
Over the last few years, two trends have defined the U.S. EV market: somber headlines and slow-but-steady growth.
In late 2023, analysts began warning EV sales were not increasing as fast as once projected as concerns about cost, range, and charger availability persisted. Some even forecast sales would decline in 2024. Major automakers began walking back their 100% electric commitments. Ultimately, new EV sales rose by just 7% last year — enough to push the sector to an annual record-high of 1.3 million vehicles sold, but far slower growth than the 49% surge in 2023.
After Republicans swept the November elections, the market’s outlook grew even gloomier. That’s because federal policies supporting EV adoption are likely to disappear or at least be severely watered down.
President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has already moved to kill the strict tailpipe emissions rules supported by legacy U.S. automakers. Congressional Republicans are on a (potentially doomed) crusade to revoke waivers that have allowed states like California and New York to ban the sale of new gas vehicles after 2035. They’re also reportedly looking to gut the consumer EV tax credit, an action that would hobble EV sales. Trump’s tariffs, such as they are, present yet another hurdle: The U.S. relies heavily on China for key battery components and minerals.
But at least in Q1, EV sales were still ticking up. And that’s despite Tesla’s big decline. The U.S. market leader saw its sales drop by 9% year-over-year, the result of a stagnant product lineup and, according to some analysts, public distaste for CEO Elon Musk’s political persona. Meanwhile, General Motors, Ford, Hyundai, and BMW all saw their sales continue to rise.
The fact that the industry managed to grow despite the struggles of its overwhelming leader — Tesla accounted for 44% of the market in Q1 — speaks to the increasing vibrancy and resilience of the U.S. EV market. The question now is whether it is vibrant and resilient enough to keep growing despite federal policy headwinds.
A correction was made on April 18, 2025: The chart and image for this story were originally incorrectly labeled with 2024. The year has been changed to 2025.
The batteries inside electric vehicles can do a lot more than power a car.
They can back up homes, schools, and businesses during power outages. They can soak up grid power when it’s plentiful and cheap and send it back when it’s scarce and costly. And they could eventually provide enough reliable power to allow utilities to avoid building more power plants or expanding their grids to meet growing demand for electricity — something that would save money for utility customers as a whole.
So far, utilities have had a hard time turning this dream of batteries on wheels into a reality. Plenty have launched these “vehicle-to-everything” (V2X) pilots, but only with mixed success. Broader adoption has been held back by the cost and complexity of getting the required technologies to work smoothly in the real world — and by an absence of well-established utility programs that pay EV owners enough to make it worth their while.
In Massachusetts, a new V2X pilot project is now seeking households, businesses, schools, nonprofits, and municipal governments to test all of these ways that EVs can help the grid. And unlike many V2X tests done by other U.S. utilities, this one will offer two key financial incentives: bidirectional chargers at no cost to participants, and real money to those who commit to letting utilities tap into their EV battery power.
Over the next nine months, the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, the state’s clean-energy economic development organization, will use most of the pilot’s $6 million in funding to give out up to 100 free bidirectional chargers. This is the technology that allows EV owners to not only pull electrons from the grid but to send power back and get paid for it. Households will get most of this equipment, but a subset of higher-voltage two-way chargers will go to commercial vehicle and electric school bus fleet operators.
Those chargers will be installed by September 2026, said Elijah Sinclair, MassCEC clean transportation program manager. The goal is for the pilot to provide about 1.5 megawatts of distributed energy storage capacity, roughly equivalent to the power use of about 250 homes.
Massachusetts law calls for 900,000 EVs on the road by 2030 in order to meet the state’s decarbonization goals. If a well-designed pilot project unlocks cost-effective ways or even a fraction of those future EV owners to enlist in V2X programs, the payoff could be huge, Sinclair said. EVs tend to stay plugged in far longer than it takes to fully charge up their batteries. Being able to tap into that stored energy expands the value that EVs can provide the grid and allows them to store solar and wind power to use later when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.
“That could be a really important piece as we seek to get to net-zero by 2050,” Sinclair said. “It still requires a whole lot of infrastructure, and it’s complicated for the utilities. But in the future, it could be serving huge loads across the grid.”
The trick is to move from the experiment stage to a safe, simple, and profitable program for a majority of the state’s EV owners, he said. It’s not something any other state or utility has managed to pull off just yet — but MassCEC and its partners are hoping the upcoming pilot will build the foundation to make that happen.
The idea of pulling power from EV batteries is far from new. Universities and research organizations have been successfully testing V2X for more than two decades, and U.S. utilities have had pilots up and running for years.
Other countries have more fully embraced the technology. Japanese automakers started enabling EVs to provide backup power via vehicle-to-home and vehicle-to-building charging to deal with the power supply emergencies that followed the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster. In Europe, vehicle-to-grid (V2G) projects have been turning a profit for commercial and government vehicle fleets for years, and more recently for consumer EVs as well.
In the U.S., by contrast, vehicle-to-grid services have largely been successful in just one niche of the EV market: electric school buses, which happen to sit unused during most of the day. In Massachusetts, the company Highland Electric Fleets and the city of Beverly have been doing V2G with school buses since 2020, and have been earning money for delivering extra power to utility grids over the past few summers.
Transit and commercial vehicles, which must be on the road more frequently and have less idle time to charge, are more challenging to make profitable.
Vehicle-to-home backup power, meanwhile, has been built into the Nissan Leaf for more than a decade, and has been a major marketing draw for the Ford F-150 Lightning electric pickup and other new EV models. But actually engineering and installing the systems to turn a home EV charging system into a backup power system for the grid is a bit more complicated — and costly.
So said Kelly Helfrich, who leads the transportation electrification practice at Resource Innovations, a company specializing in clean-energy program implementation that is co-leading the MassCEC V2X program. She’s worked in the EV space for more than a decade, including a stint at General Motors that covered the automaker’s entry into vehicle-to-grid technology and its eventual development of V2G standards.
Bidirectional chargers are more costly and technically difficult to build compared to simple one-way chargers. That investment may well be worth it for school buses, which have big batteries that can earn lots of money while they’re sitting idle. But for everyday households, it’s harder to see a path to recouping the extra $5,000 to $10,000 in up-front costs that bidirectional equipment can bring, Helfrich said.
Installing free chargers for homeowners, as the MassCEC program is doing, “helps take that cost out of the equation,” she said, “to really test vehicle-to-home at a larger scale than we’d be able to if we were to rely on consumers to take on that expense.”
Successful V2X programs also need to make sure participants get paid for taking part.
On that front, Massachusetts already has an established program that lets EV owners earn money by helping the grid, according to Zach Woogen, executive director of the Vehicle-Grid Integration Council, a group representing EV and charging manufacturers that’s working with utilities and regulators across the country.
ConnectedSolutions is a long-running offering from utilities National Grid and Eversource, which operate in Massachusetts and other New England states. The program pays customers for reducing grid strain during hours of high demand for electricity, usually during hot summer afternoons and evenings.
ConnectedSolutions already pays EV owners who avoid charging during those hours, Woogen said. It also allows customers to earn money for power they send back to the grid from batteries attached to their rooftop solar systems — or, more recently, from EVs in fleets owned by businesses, schools, or governments.
Tapping into the collective flexibility of batteries, EV chargers, rooftop solar, remote-controllable thermostats, and other devices to create “virtual power plants” could unlock gigawatts of capacity across the country. Companies targeting these opportunities have given ConnectedSolutions high marks for its relatively straightforward rules and lucrative payments.
Right now, the program doesn’t allow residential EVs to send power back to the grid, Woogen noted. But it could allow homes to reduce their grid draw by supplying part of their own electricity use during times of peak demand, or explore other opportunities to reward households for making their vehicles available when power demand is highest.
A handful of other utility V2X programs are paying households for their EV battery power. California utility Pacific Gas & Electric has a V2X pilot that pays participants and recently expanded it to support up-front installation costs for General Motors EV-compatible bidirectional chargers. But PG&E’s compensation structure is tied up in a more complicated dynamic pricing pilot program with less certain long-term prospects than the ConnectedSolutions initiative, Woogen said.
Other programs offer easy-to-understand and lucrative payments to customers but don’t take on the high up-front cost of setting up bidirectional charging. Maryland utility Baltimore Gas & Electric launched a program last year that offers up to $1,000 a month for owners of Ford F-150 Lightning electric pickups who let the utility tap their batteries during grid peaks. But few customers have installed the necessary bidirectional charger and control systems, which cost roughly $9,000.
Government incentives can’t keep bankrolling EV owners to install V2X equipment forever, of course. But they’re vital to getting enough customers to sign up so that utilities can test the real-world effects, costs, and benefits of tapping those EV batteries at a scale that really affects the grid.
Incentives also encourage automakers, charging system manufacturers, and software providers to work with utilities on making V2X technologies ready for prime time, Woogen said. “We’re at an early stage of the market — and we don’t yet have that competition to drive down costs for customers.”
The Vehicle-Grid Integration Council’s role in the MassCEC pilot is to organize all these industry participants and to track progress. The first and most fundamental goal, Woogen said, is determining whether bidirectional chargers can “safely and reliably connect with the grid in a way that’s reasonably low-cost and reliable and fast.”
That’s a work in progress, he said. Over the past decade or so, a growing list of charging equipment has been approved for installation by a subset of U.S. utilities working on V2X. New developments are making it possible for EVs themselves to push power back to the grid without a bidirectional charger, although automakers and utilities haven’t gotten to the point of allowing EV customers to use that technology outside of strictly controlled settings.
Utilities have to be sure that hooking high-voltage EV batteries into buildings and the grid is safe before they can let it happen at large scale, Helfrich said. Resource Innovations has longstanding relationships with National Grid and Eversource, and is working with the state’s other investor-owned and municipal utilities as well, she said.
MassCEC has also partnered with an experienced V2X technology partner to select and install the 100 bidirectional chargers. That’s The Mobility House, a German company with technology now in use in large-scale fleet charging projects as well as in Europe’s first mass-market residential V2G program.
“For this project, we’re acting as the technology expert,” said Russell Vare, Mobility House’s vice president of vehicle-grid integration. “That means bringing the right hardware and the software to do both the control for the energy and the aggregation and optimization.”
It also means tracking some far more prosaic data points that are important for V2X, he said. Take the inherently mobile nature of an EV battery — ”Is the car driving around, or is it plugged in?” That’s a big deal when a utility needs to know exactly how much EV battery capacity it can rely on for an upcoming demand peak.
Then there’s the to-be-collected data on how much money it takes to convince customers to use their EV as a backup battery or to allow it to be used to help the grid, Vare said. “How large does that value need to be to encourage them to participate?”
That’s important information for state agencies and utilities to have on hand as they plan out the next phases of their V2X efforts, Woogen said — and it’s an important part of the pilot project. The Vehicle-Grid Integration Council and consultancy Converge Strategies will collect feedback from automakers, charging vendors, utilities, local governments, community members, and the customers who get the 100 bidirectional chargers over the course of the pilot.
That work is meant to inform a guidebook by the end of next year that can inform policymakers and utilities looking at how to build V2X into their clean energy strategy, Helfrich said — not just in Massachusetts but around the country.
“It’s going to be a documentation of everything we designed for this two-year program,” she said — “what went well, what did not go well, and what should be considered in moving these programs to a more mature scale.”
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