About 6 million electric vehicles are on American roads, and roughly 1 million of them can already export power back to the grid. A typical one sits parked about 95 percent of the day, plugged in for 12 to 14 hours while needing 2 to 3 hours of charge. Texas still meets most of that capacity as load.

That works out to roughly 10 gigawatts of export capacity. In ERCOT the value of tapping it splits three ways, because transmission and distribution utilities own the wires, competitive retailers sell the electricity, and generators sell the power. A TXU Energy customer in Oncor territory can collect free overnight charging from the retailer and a separate rebate from the utility, with nothing combining the two.

On this episode of the Energy Capital Podcast, Matt Boms talks with Joseph Vellone, chief executive of ChargeScape, the vehicle-grid venture owned by BMW, Ford, Honda, and Nissan, about what it takes to move a parked car from load to capacity. The core argument: the hardware is arriving on its own, and what holds the resource back is incentive design and interconnection policy.

For years EVs have been cast as a threat to grid stability. Vellone calls that a misconception and points to record adoption without failure: “we haven’t brought the power grid down.” During the episode, Boms and Vellone work through:

* Split incentives in ERCOT, why a deregulated market gives the wires company, the retailer, and the generator each a reason to pay an EV driver and none of them a reason to coordinate.

* Grid-parallel interconnection, the argument that a vehicle backing up a home without exporting to the grid should not need an interconnection agreement.

* V1G, V2H, and V2G, the three tiers of vehicle-grid integration, what each requires in hardware, and which are running commercially today.

* The lease-return wave, Cox Automotive’s forecast of 300,000 EVs coming off lease in 2026 to second owners more price-sensitive than the first.

How the Public Utility Commission draws the line between grid-parallel operation and export will shape how much of that parked capacity ERCOT can call on.

Chapters

00:00 – Introduction: Joseph Vellone and ChargeScape

02:34 – Why competing automakers built a shared platform

05:49 – When an EV becomes a grid resource

07:35 – V1G, V2H, and V2G in plain English

10:48 – Six million EVs and 10 gigawatts of export capacity

12:07 – The consumer progression to bidirectional charging

15:57 – Texas incentives and what moves customer behavior

18:07 – The changing profile of the American EV driver

21:04 – Policy barriers: unstacked value and interconnection queues

24:58 – Splitting EV value across ERCOT wires, retail, and generation

28:00 – Grid-parallel interconnection at the PUCT

30:05 – Scaling from pilots to full market participation

32:50 – Secondhand EVs, multifamily, and fleets

37:15 – Why record EV adoption has not strained the grid

Resources

People & Organizations

* Matt Boms (LinkedIn)

* Texas Advanced Energy Business Alliance (Website - LinkedIn)

* Joseph Vellone, CEO of ChargeScape, previously North America head at ev.energy and a consultant at Boston Consulting Group (LinkedIn)

* ChargeScape (Website)

* Energy Capital (Podcast - LinkedIn - Apple Podcasts - Spotify)

Company & Industry News

* BMW, Ford and Honda Agree to Create ChargeScape, the 2023 agreement forming the joint venture, built on the Open Vehicle-Grid Integration Platform

* ChargeScape Welcomes Nissan to Its Alliance of Automakers, making Nissan an equal 25 percent investor alongside BMW, Ford, and Honda

* PUCT Project No. 54233, Technical Requirements and Interconnection Processes for Distributed Energy Resources, the rulemaking covering new 16 TAC 25.210, amendments to 25.211, and the repeal and replacement of 25.212

* Vehicle-Grid Integration Council comments in Project No. 54233, addressing grid-parallel bidirectional charging and the V2G DC and V2G AC configurations

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Ten gigawatts are parked in American driveways

Energy Capital Podcast (private feed for [email protected])

Ten gigawatts are parked in American driveways