Tesla has announced that it will introduce a new feature to its electric vehicles that has exciting implications for the future of clean energy. During the recent Tesla Investor Day, Tesla's Senior Vice President for Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Drew Baglino, confirmed that all of the company's EVs will have bidirectional charging by 2025.
"We've found ways to bring bidirectionality while actually reducing the cost of power electronics in the vehicle," Baglino said. "And at all things Tesla, the goal is usually to get more for less. And so, we are in the middle of a kind of power electronics retool, I would say, that would bring that functionality to all of our vehicles over the next two years."
Bidirectional charging capability is a feature that enables an EV's DC power to be converted back to AC power for external usage. Put more simply, it allows electricity to flow out of the EV instead of just in, meaning that your EV can essentially act as a charger itself.
The implications of this capability are wide-ranging and exciting. One use for bidirectional charging is that you could use your EV to power your home in the event of a blackout, as one Ford F-150 Lightning owner recently did. (The F-150 Lightning already has bidirectional charging equipped.)
You could also use your EV to store energy collected from your solar panels and then sell that electricity back to the grid, as one Australian man has done.
And the uses for bidirectional charging go even further than that. As CleanTechnica eloquently put it, "The dream for many is a scenario in which millions of electric cars are all connected to the grid most of the time. They could absorb lots of renewable energy from solar panels during the day and feed it back into the grid after dark. The grid would become like the tides — distributing zero-emissions energy all day every day and reclaiming it at night."
CleanTechnica's commenters were also excited about the possibility of more EVs being equipped with bidirectional charging.
"There are going to be lots of EVs in the next 10 years. Assuming they get used as little as cars currently get used, it's good to find another use for them as they sit in parking spots," wrote one commenter. "It's good seeing this ball getting pushed along, even if non-mobile home battery sellers see it as a threat."
"I personally am basing my EV purchasing decisions on V2G," wrote another. "It will be a nice boon, and assuming utilities want to make money, they will make offers that are worth it to me and save them money during times they would otherwise be at the mercy of a very high wholesale market."
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