In this episode, I talk with GM Energy executive Aseem Kapur about General Motors’ move into bidirectional EV charging and home energy management. We dig into the practicalities of turning hundreds of thousands of EVs into mobile backup generators, how to navigate a patchwork of 4,000 different utilities, and what it takes to get everyday consumers to see their cars as grid assets.
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David Roberts
Hello everybody. This is Volts for June 19, 2026: “America’s flagship automaker enters the home energy market.” I’m your host, David Roberts.
Last week, General Motors — America’s top automaker, and its No. 2 seller of electric vehicles, behind Tesla — made a series of announcements that are of great interest to Volts listeners.
The first is the debut of Energy Pass, a collaboration between GM and EV-charging providers that will offer a single account for owners of any GM brand EV (including Cadillac, Chevrolet, etc.) that can access an array of fast chargers from Tesla, Electrify America, IONNA, and more. (Energy Pass currently covers about 70% of existing fast chargers, with more being added soon.) The goal is to simplify the EV-charging experience so that EV owners no longer have to juggle multiple apps and accounts to find a charger when they’re on the road. It’s a big step toward that much-hoped-for future when EV owners can simply stop at any fast charger they want and begin charging without fuss.
The second is about a new collaboration between GM and Peak Energy, which provides sodium-ion batteries for grid-scale energy storage. Regular Volts listeners are, of course, familiar with Peak Energy and with sodium-ion batteries, as I interviewed Peak CEO Landon Mossberg on the pod last year. This is a huge boost for the sodium-ion market, which is very cool because sodium-ion batteries contain cheaper and less-toxic materials than conventional lithium-based batteries, work over a wider array of temperatures, and generally last longer, with less need for cooling and maintenance. It is also a battery market that China does not yet dominate and the US still has a chance to compete in. This is part of a broader shift we’re seeing as several US automakers pivot into the grid battery space, which is going to be a huge boon to the grid.
And finally, the announcement that is the subject of today’s podcast: GM is investing heavily in bidirectional EV chargers that will enable vehicle-to-home (V2H) and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) integration. GM already has several hundred thousand EVs on the road that are capable of bidirectional charging, but of course, getting it to actually work requires homeowners to buy and install home chargers, inverters, and batteries, and for utilities to enable V2G by establishing the right kinds of tariffs and programs.
That is a complicated thicket of challenges, and that is what I flew to San Francisco to discuss with GM Energy’s Chief Revenue Officer, Aseem Kapur. Kapur comes out of the utility space — he spent over 18 years with Con Edison, working on information technology and distribution system planning — and is now playing a key role in GM Energy’s efforts to integrate its EVs with the grid, to provide EV owners with new streams of value and the grid with new sources of flexible demand and stability. We got into all those issues in our conversation, which I very much enjoyed and hope you do too.
Aseem Kapur, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Let’s start with what the product is. When I think about the home energy ecosystem, a lot of things are potentially involved in that: solar panels, inverters, smart appliances, home energy management systems, batteries, EV chargers, EVs, etc. What chunk of that are you biting off? What is the home energy product that you’re starting out selling?
Aseem Kapur
Our home energy management ecosystem has the EV at the heart. It starts with the EV that connects with a bidirectional charger, that then connects with an off-board inverter. We have a smart panel that allows the customer to configure what circuits they want to back up from their EV. Those are the three basic components that you need with an EV in order to have a vehicle-to-home capable technology or system that allows your EV to serve as a backup generator. You can then optionally add what we call our stationary storage system, what we call the power bank product.
You can add that on. It comes in different configurations starting at 11.5 kilowatt-hours, all the way to 35.2 kilowatt-hours. That gives you the flexibility. In the event that you don’t have an EV, you can use your stationary storage system to back up your home. Depending on whether you are an existing solar customer or considering solar, the system is compatible with both AC solar systems as well as DC solar systems. The system is configured to design.
To your point earlier, the ecosystem extends to smart appliances, smart panels. All of that is outside the purview of what we’re doing. We’re leading with that EV experience because the true capability that we are unlocking for our customers is the flexibility. You can pull electrons from the EV, you can pull electrons from your stationary storage system. You can do either or you can do both. You can stack them. That is what we are offering that’s unmatched by any other OEM that’s out in the industry today. And you heard about it today at the event. We have 12 EVs that are capable of this technology. Today we have a car park of about 250,000 EVs on the road that are capable of this tech.
David Roberts
If you’re going to use it for backup, that means you need to be able to island from the grid.
Aseem Kapur
That’s correct.
David Roberts
Which is not an automatic feature. A lot of people get solar systems and think that they’re going to be able to do that, and then it turns out you have to have the right kind of inverter to do that. This is what your inverter can do. That just trips automatically if grid power stops coming in?
Aseem Kapur
Yes. The inverter is designed; it satisfies the UL standard that is required, 1741, that is necessary to be compliant with islanding requirements with the grid. That serves two purposes. One, it allows you to island from the grid itself. The second aspect is it works hand in hand with the smart panel in terms of controlling the circuits that you’re powering from the vehicle itself. That is the configuration, the way the system is designed. It’s designed to be modular because in many cases customers get into the EV and the bidirectional charger first, and then they decide later that they want to upgrade, and from there they invest in our inverter and the smart panel. That’s the technology that protects the home from the grid, ensuring that we satisfy the islanding requirement.
David Roberts
Do you have to get the utility involved in any way? If you’re islanding from the grid, my understanding is that you have to at least get sign-off from the utility. If you’re going to install one of these things in your garage, what permissions do you need?
Aseem Kapur
The answer varies. It varies on where you live. There are 4,000 utilities in the United States. They all have their own requirements. In most cases, the answer is they just need to be notified; they do not have to approve the installation of the system. That is true for the majority of the cases. However, there are scenarios where the utility does approve the drawings, does sign off on the installation, and confirms that there is no backup power that can get into the system.
One of the upfront requirements that we’re satisfying is that we’re getting our hardware qualified with all utility programs. We’re ensuring that our inverter, the smart panel, and the EV or the battery, the utility is indifferent to it. But we’re ensuring that both the panel and the inverter are certified as approved products by the utility companies because that’s a big step in ensuring that the customer doesn’t have to go through additional approvals.
David Roberts
One of the things I’m curious about with all this is how you’re selling it, how you’re marketing it. I follow this stuff all the time, I’m geeked out about home energy, etc. But I’m assuming that most — especially if you want to scale this stuff up — most of your customers are just going to be people out shopping for a car who know nothing about anything. Is there a home energy package that you’re offering that bundles these things together? How are you pitching this to the customer? Where does the customer encounter this? Is it at a GM dealership or what’s the customer interface and packaging?
Aseem Kapur
Yeah, it’s a very astute observation. Our go-to-market strategy is dependent on our dealer network. We are a B2B2C company. We have 4,000 dealers and 90% of the US population is within 10 miles of a GM dealership. We have the benefit of the scale and the reach. Typically, the customer’s journey starts with an EV. It’s about educating the customer on all the features the EV has, which includes the energy features — like bidirectional capability — and then qualifying the customer at the point of sale with the dealership on whether they’re interested in additional capabilities like home energy management or backup power.
Typically, we rely on the dealer to get the customer into the charger, get the charger installed in the customer’s garage, and then offer them two options. They can buy a unidirectional charger or they can buy a bidirectional charger, depending on whether they’re a homeowner, how informed they are about local utility incentives, how passionate they are about clean energy or sustainability generally.
Typically, the dealer network helps us qualify the customer, and if there is interest, we then follow up, we call the customer, we put a proposal in front of them that is very unique and specific to where they live based on the energy prices in the grid, the reliability metrics. We pull all of that data in to put a proposal in front of the customer. We also aggregate all the incentives and then we tell them, “Customer, if you make an investment and purchase a home energy bundle, this is what the ROI of that investment looks like.” It is a high-touch sales experience, but it fast follows from the conversation after the dealership.
David Roberts
One thing I often hear from EV owners or prospective EV owners is that dealers themselves are not super familiar with EVs, and I’m sure you have heard these complaints. For as many EVs as GM sells, it is still a small percentage of the total sales. I hear from people all the time who go to dealerships and the dealers do not even know the basic features of EVs, much less home energy management systems. How big of a piece is dealership education and training? Is that part of all this?
Aseem Kapur
Yeah, absolutely. That is one of the largest areas where we invest, and as part of our go-to-market strategy, it’s about how do we enable that channel. We support the dealers with marketing, we support the dealers with running campaigns that generate traffic into the dealerships. As part of that campaign, we also educate them on how to talk about the product. That goes back to the core EV. We have some very intensive training requirements.
I’m new to the industry, I’ve only been with GM for about four years because I was in the energy sector. I’ve been floored by the amount of investment GM makes in training the dealers and also investing in helping them load the product. Most of these people are car enthusiasts. They’re very passionate about the technology. They love cars. The key is then how to get them to talk about energy.
David Roberts
It’s not necessarily natural. I think of the two as very overlapping, but I’m not sure it comes naturally to a car enthusiast.
Aseem Kapur
I’m in the same camp as you. I feel they’re interchangeable. In most cases, what we find is that we want to keep things simple. We start at the basics, which is around charging. Let’s help the customer get comfortable with charging. EV lifestyle involves having accessible charging, whether it’s your home or public. That’s where we invest our resources with the dealer network and we get them comfortable with how to make the product, how to offer the chargers or the adapters, how to help them finance or lease them. We educate them on the public charging network, Energy Pass, for instance. We do a lot of that onboard training. Anything related to energy today, we fast follow with the high-touch sales experience. Just the nature of how we’re unlocking the market.
I will add, to your earlier observation, dealers have different degrees of interest. We have dealers in parts of the country where EV adoption consistently remains high that have figured out the entire installation network. They have looked at the customer journey, what it takes to get the customer into a car, what type of charger they need, how to get the charger installed. These are entrepreneurial, very progressive business people and they are driven to ensure that they deliver the best customer experience.
One of the key metrics that they are driving towards that they share with us is NPS, which is the net promoter score. Specifically, how a customer who leaves the dealership rates the dealership on that overall purchase experience. Early on, yes, there were marked different NPS scores between buying a gas vehicle versus an EV vehicle. But we’ve seen in states where there is highest adoption that the NPS for EV customers is higher — order of magnitude higher — than gas customers. There is a tide that is turning. It is slower than we all expected, but it is turning and there is light at the end of the tunnel.
David Roberts
Is GM viewing this as a way to sell more cars, as almost a loss leader to increase EV adoption, attaching this to EVs, or does it view the home energy business as something that might take on a life of its own and become a serious revenue generator and even be sold to people who own different kinds of EVs, non-GM EVs? How attached is the home energy business to the car business?
Aseem Kapur
At a corporate level, it is one of our top strategic KPIs that is measured at the senior-most leadership level, and we report those metrics up to the board. GM Energy is one of those business units that is measured on its performance. To answer your question, it’s all of the above. What it means for the consumers today is how do you get them comfortable with charging that EV lifestyle, and then if they’re interested, how do we get them into a home energy management system?
The reality is, and a lot of the discussion we had today with the panels, what Kurt talked about and what Wade talked about, the future of the grid is mobility and energy converge. EVs are a flexible energy resource. Whether it is flexible supply or flexible demand, they are going to continue to have a solution to support affordable grid expansion. That is the way we look at it. If we do not actively lean in and have a role to play, we are not going to be able to differentiate our core product, which is the EV. We have got the battery technology, we have got the industrialization and scale, but most importantly, where the rubber really meets the road is with consumer experience. What we are really good at and where we can lean in with scale is how to solve for the tough problems.
You asked the question earlier, what permission do you need with the utility? The answer varies. You can’t expect the customer to know this, you can’t expect the dealer to know this. That’s where we come in. We come in to say, “We’re going to thread that ecosystem. We’re going to take this from a consumer standpoint to understand.” Today it’s all about how do you get the customer comfortable with an EV. In the very near future, it’s all about how do you reposition the customer to think of an EV as an energy asset. We are solving for all those pain points step by step to ensure that it’s a consistent, repeatable experience across all our 4,000 dealerships.
That will take threading that problem statement across multiple utilities. That’s the reason why we’re investing, because it’s good for the customer, it’s good for the grid. As Sterling said, and I loved his comment at the end, it’s probably the first time in history when all of the incentives are getting aligned across energy companies, OEMs, battery manufacturers, because there is an unprecedented demand that the grid is facing and you need all solutions to come to market. It’s in our collective interest to solve for the consumer pain point, because you can’t drive adoption without solving for the complexity the customer is going to face. Our core motto as a corporation is keep things simple.
David Roberts
In terms of the customer experience, if I buy my EV, say I know nothing about any of this, I go to the dealership, they sell me an EV, they sell me the home energy package with it, GM comes and installs it, an electrician comes and installs it. Who comes and installs it? What’s that touch point look like?
Aseem Kapur
I’ll be brief in terms of just walking us through the journey. Typically, a dealer qualifies the customer for us. We have a home energy consultant team, which are highly specialized energy consultants who will call the customer, put the offer in front of the consumer, and if the consumer expresses interest, they’ll handle their payment and financing, all of the rest. The product gets directly shipped to the consumer’s home in parallel. We also give the consumer the option to either work with our certified installer network and receive a quote for their installation, which allows us to manage both the quality and the price of the installation, and ensure that the customer is aware of the timing and the cost before they make the final decision to purchase the hardware. That is a really important point of the journey.
We also give the customer the choice to go out and get their own electrician. What we find is that in most cases that experience is inferior because the electricians are not familiar with the technology. It’s new. We have an internal metric that drives both the sales teams and our delivery teams to incentivize the consumer to work through our install network and be transparent on the price, be transparent on the timing. Today we’re building out an installation network. Much like how some of the other industries I’ve worked in, whether it’s the solar industry, it all comes down to the distribution network and the installation network. We are building that installer network.
The good thing is that we have the opportunity to do it in some states first, where we see the highest adoption, and that is allowing us to refine that experience, learn from it, build a network. More importantly, just in the last nine months since we have been selling the system, we have seen a 30% drop in installation prices. The way we have been able to achieve that is we are improving the product to take price out, to make it easier to install.
Second, we’re training the installers. Something that they would read through a manual and probably take them three days to figure out, we’re saying, “Here’s a video, here’s how you can do it and reduce the amount of installation.” We measure ourselves on total time to commissioning. We measure ourselves on what percentage of all the sales are going through our installer network. We know in the end the NPS score that we’re going to get through a transaction that flows end to end through our network is a lot higher than when the customer has to handle that on their own.
David Roberts
Once it’s installed, does it just work? How much fiddling does a customer have to do with it on an ongoing basis? Can you just install it, set it, and forget it, or are there settings, are there interventions that the customer has to make? How much of it is self-running?
Aseem Kapur
I’d love to sit here and tell you that everything runs 100% of the time, wholeheartedly. The first step in the process is you get it commissioned. Once the system is commissioned, up and running, it’s visible in our backend systems. We have what we call the energy cloud platform. We can see the asset. At that point in time, we have monitoring capability. It also allows us to do over-the-air firmware updates. We’re continuously enhancing the product, we’re adding features, and in some cases we’re removing features that add complexity to the installation.
As the product is dynamically evolving, it allows us to do over-the-air updates. That is a very key capability. The third piece is we are learning. This is the first version of the product. In order for us to truly improve the next generation of the product, early customers who adopted the technology today are giving us a lot of feedback. We go out and do customer testimonials, we are doing our research, focus group studies.
It’s not only about how to sell and install it. We’re saying, “How do you use it?” What is it that you find the most valuable? Is it the fact that it keeps your lights on? Is it the fact that you’re saving money based on energy rates? As we learn those preferences for consumers, we want to take that feedback loop into our product life cycles and continue to improve that.
David Roberts
Do the customers have to do anything to it?
Aseem Kapur
They don’t have to do anything to it once it’s configured and set up. I can’t tell you how many customers, when we’ve gone out and done interviews, have told us they slept through outages without even knowing that their car powered their home.
David Roberts
Every string you pull in decarbonization these days, or affordability or resilience, name it, you end up with batteries. This is the way to think about EVs now: just mobile batteries. That is the unlock, but that is not necessarily how consumers currently think about them.
It sounds like the immediate pitch — the systems that are being sold today — is based on backup power. That’s the value proposition. Are you targeting presumably states or areas where blackouts are more common and frequent? There are a few reliable grids in the US where people don’t necessarily have to worry about this. Where is that a sufficient value proposition?
Aseem Kapur
Everything is batteries. The focus area for us is really in states where we see the highest adoption of EVs. I’ll explain how and why we focus there. In most cases, when customers are entering into an EV lifestyle, they are worried about what they are going to charge. Is it the home, is it the public? Public charging infrastructure is gradually becoming more common, mainstream, and more reliable. That is going to take time.
Our first value proposition is, “Let’s get the charger installed in the home.” The lion’s share of charging happens at home, and in order to improve the TCO or the total cost of ownership is when we offer the home energy bundle to say, “You can save money, especially if you live in a state where you have tariffs that support that structure, whether it’s free nighttime charging or you have lower price for charging.” That’s typically the entry point.
We’ve also seen that after major weather events, like we had a tough winter out in the East Coast, out in the Southeast as well, when we’ve run targeted campaigns in those states, we’ve gotten a lot of interest. People have reached out to us. Going back to the point around decarbonization, now some states have mandates around new natural gas connections. They can’t go out and get a backup gas generator because it takes a lot more time and money to get that. They’re either left with using a diesel backup generator, and those are available in the market. But then they realize that they’re noisy, they’re costly. In most cases, our biggest opportunity is awareness. Most people don’t know about our hidden secret that all our EVs are capable of bidirectional generation.
David Roberts
They are backup generators.
Aseem Kapur
Yes.
David Roberts
This is the beauty of batteries. They are everything. On the tariff question, that’s also different utility to utility. Only some utilities have these time-of-use tariffs. If I’m a customer and I am in one of those areas, and arbitrage, moving the timing of my charging back and forth to take advantage of that — is that all done behind the scenes too? Do you pitch that to the customer, saying, “We’ll do this arbitraging for you and we’ll save you some money”? But again, you don’t have to fiddle with anything. You don’t have to be aware of the tariffs or know anything about the tariffs, etc.
Aseem Kapur
Today what we do is we expose the tariffs to the consumer. It’s an education. Most of us don’t even look at our electric bills to really understand what we pay for energy. We don’t care about it unless the bill is higher than what we paid last month or our lights are out. That’s the beauty of the monopolistic utility business model. For us, it comes down to giving customers the choice to be able to configure the vehicle and making them aware.
We say, “You can set up your charging schedule in your infotainment system in the car, or you can do it on your app.” Where we have partnerships with energy companies, where we’re running managed charging programs, we give the customer the option to opt in. We actively enroll the customer into a program that’s offered by the local utility. It’s not available in every state, it’s not available in every utility. Those programs are growing. As those programs are growing, we have an entire team that’s focused on ensuring that our customers have access to those programs because it drives confidence in our product and the experience. They can lower their energy costs. That’s the second step in the journey.
In the future, and I would say in the very near future, what we’re trying to do with companies like PG&E out in San Francisco, our vision is that we want to enroll the consumer at the point of sale. When they leave the dealership, they’ve opted in to a program. Their settings in their vehicle and in their app are preconfigured in order to support and manage that experience that’s conducive to the grid where they live. If they are going to save money on it or make money on it, like through arbitrage, then it can directly impact their EV ownership experience. If we move these incentives forward and lower the monthly lease payment for EV car buyers—
David Roberts
Folding the utility savings into the price of the EV lease.
Aseem Kapur
That’s correct. Now it’s a very sticky transaction. It’s a very sticky ecosystem that allows the customer to appropriate that value with the investment that they’ve made in the EV. That’s the net benefit. We are trying that and testing this actively in San Francisco. We’ve got four or five dealerships that are lined up to support that.
The reason why we’re so bullish about it is that it just takes away all the complexity. None of us want to sit here and read our bills, understand tariffs, figure out how to configure our car. Some of us who are tech enthusiasts will jump in, but my mother is not going to do it. She just wants set and forget. To get there, when you buy the car, it should already come preconfigured with that capability and I should see the value either immediately or in something that I associate with my car purchase. That’s the vision.
David Roberts
This is slightly esoteric, but I’ve wondered about it before: if you are selling these cars as batteries — that’s what all this is about — your car is a big battery. Big batteries can do a lot of things other than drive you around. What’s the value proposition for then also having a home battery? The study that you all sent me says that in terms of just the value to the grid, the economics are generally better for home batteries just because they don’t detach and drive to the store periodically. Why would an average customer want both their EV and a home battery? Since they’re both batteries.
Aseem Kapur
Today the choice is frankly driven by price point. Can I afford to have both? Because I have the flexibility in the event that the car’s not home and I want to keep the lights on, I can use the backup battery. We sell about the same number of systems — full home energy management systems — as we do vehicle-to-home systems. The distribution of the product mix is about 50/50. In the future, and you have seen the E3 study, we need to have product parity with stationary storage.
For a customer to consider an EV and a grid operator — and I worked in the energy industry for two decades, worked as a utility operator and I worked in those control rooms — as a former operator, to be able to dispatch that resource, that needs to be firm capacity. You need to be able to call on it and it needs to respond within eight cycles, or else you’re going to trip all the circuits upstream. That has significant impact on reliability.
For us, it comes down to: we’ve launched the first generation of technology. As technology improves over time, whether it’s onboard inverters on the vehicle, the battery, the energy density both on the EV and the stationary battery, the unit cost for that available capacity or the flexible demand, as Patti talked about earlier, continues to drop on a per kilowatt-hour basis. At that point, there’ll be a trade-off where the difference between a mobile battery per unit cost versus a stationary battery — in some markets the customer will be indifferent. We’re not there today yet. Where we are today is where the market is unlocking. All the incentives are tied to stationary storage and specifically stationary storage paired with solar. That’s what’s most impactful to the grid. If you don’t do it in an organized way, it can be fairly harmful to the grid. That’s the key.
David Roberts
One more question about the vehicle-to-home, the basic system, which I think the home energy package is something like around $7,000, which is a decent chunk of money. Have you thought about financing tools? You mentioned that you might be able to fold the utility incentives in and bring that down a little bit. I’m wondering how daunting that price point is for customers.
Aseem Kapur
It is not for everyone at that price point. In order for us to lower the barrier for entry, we are in the process of offering a leasing program. I don’t have a date for that yet. Leasing the home energy system, specifically leasing the home energy systems. One of the biggest drivers for that is the change in the legislation that happened last year. The investment tax credit for batteries, for residential batteries specifically, has been extended through leasing offers. It’s advantageous.
It’s not available in all states. However, the states that allow for third-party operated leases or TPO leases specifically allow customers to take advantage of the tax credit as well, in addition to lowering their monthly payment. You can buy it on payments versus paying it all upfront. Both of which we are actively working our way through. It’s a new asset class for us. As we work through the regulatory requirements, as we work through the details around getting approvals to offer leases to consumers directly, we are going to launch that offering soon.
David Roberts
The vehicle-to-home stuff is in some sense pretty straightforward. I think an average consumer can get it. It’s a battery, it can be my generator. They have a mental category for that. Once you get into the vehicle-to-grid stuff, then you’re in more complicated territory. From what I can tell, I’m trying to get a sense of how far along that is. The systems are capable of it, but how many of these systems are actually being used that way, that the grid operators are aware of them and coordinating them in some sense and using them as demand response? As far as I can tell, that’s not happening on a commercial basis anywhere yet.
Everything seems like it’s testing and pilot programs. What is the state of the vehicle-to-grid side of this?
Aseem Kapur
The way I think about the state of the vehicle-to-grid technology is that it’s emerging and it’s accelerating at a pretty fast pace.
David Roberts
People have been talking about this for a long time, and it hasn’t amounted to much to date. Do you think it’s reaching a threshold?
Aseem Kapur
Yeah, it is. What has changed — absolutely, people have been talking about it for about a decade now. What’s different now, in this moment in history, is the fact that for the first time utilities are facing unprecedented demand. They can’t build their way out to serve all this capacity, and they need flexible grid resources.
As we heard Patti talk about this today, and she’s one of the most emphatic proponents, adding flexible demand to the grid improves grid utilization and is good for the customer, the grid, and lowers cost for everybody. It’s the most affordable way to add grid expansion by adding flexible electrons in the grid. That is, by far, probably has always existed, but the need for it is now as all AI-driven demand is coming on and autonomous vehicles, as electrification generally is happening. That trend has accelerated just over the course of the last year.
Plus, as AI technology is evolving very quickly and the frontier large language models are moving towards now small language models, a lot of the inference is moving to the grid edge, or what we call the edge compute. That is going to become increasingly more important. Each of us is going to have more compute that’s available on our laptops, on our phones. As that per capita for energy consumption increases, what it does for the grid is now you have all that grid congestion that moves to the last mile.
We talked about queues this morning, around the fact that PG&E territory has 8 to 10 year queues to connect this gigawatt-scale supply. You have to solve for that, definitely, you have to work towards solving for that. More importantly, you can’t ignore the fact that the last mile is far more expensive to upgrade and replace because you have to do it one by one. Especially in cities like San Francisco or New York, where the cost of infrastructure upgrade is significant or it can be very prohibitive. The flexible capacity becomes more important.
What gives me confidence on why we are here now and why we haven’t been here for the last decade is the fact that the emerging need and, more importantly, the consumer behavior. We’re adopting this technology in our day-to-day lives. My own recollection is from the time when iPhone first came out and we were all excited about the apps and we threw away the physical maps and started using the map app on the phone. That’s the closest analogy I can think of in my life on how agents are changing the way we use AI.
As more dependence increases and consumer behavior is changing, this is going to become mainstream for us. Grid planners and technology drivers for the first time are now saying, “We have to think through programs that drive or incentivize customers to bring these flexible resources to the grid.” Time-of-use tariffs — there was a study just in the E3 study that was the basis and one of the things they talked about — it is the first time in the US regulatory framework when you have more time-of-use rates than you have ever had in any other utility.
David Roberts
It does seem that it’s becoming the default. Every utility is eventually heading in that direction for various reasons. One of the ways I’ve always seen this framed by companies that are out doing this stuff on the edge is every house is a pre-approved Internet connection. There’s no interconnection queue. The residences are already there, approved. Why not exploit every one of those already existing interconnections as much as you can? Why not get as much out of it as you can?
Aseem Kapur
The way I think about this is, and without totally geeking out on this topic —
David Roberts
Feel free to geek out.
Aseem Kapur
Flexible interconnections have to be the common standard. You can’t expect a customer to have to upgrade your panel every time you have to go out and buy a new car or buy a new laptop. That’s just ridiculous. You cannot live in a world where the physical grid constraint holds you up from having access to innovation. To that end, flexible grid interconnections are really important. How do you get to that flexibility? You need to be able to call on those flexible resources, you need to be able to dispatch them and optimize them.
That is where our technology investments unlock that platform. GM is investing in that technology with GM Energy that has the software layer with this virtual power plant. You have millions of these batteries on wheels that become a virtual power plant. Now they can interconnect with the grid. I don’t have to upgrade my service, I don’t have to upgrade my panel.
David Roberts
What if I have a 120-volt panel? Do I have to upgrade to 240? Even a Level 2 charger — a lot of people, this is a barrier to them. If they have an old panel, I assume you at least have to have a 240-volt connection to have all this equipment, all this home energy equipment.
Aseem Kapur
You need to have an 80-amp. 80-amp is the maximum that you do. In fact, if you want to keep it under 40 amps, we allow for the charger to be derated and to keep it under 11.5 kilowatt-hours. We give the option because the charger is designed, because it’s an AC/DC charger coupled. You charge on AC and you can have two different speeds. You can charge at 11.5 kilowatt-hours or 19.2. The constraint there is whether or not you need a panel upgrade. We allow the customer to derate it.
On the discharge capacity, it’s the same 9.6 kilowatt-hours. The amount of energy that you draw out of the battery in the vehicle is the same in either configuration. We’ve thought through that and how to make it cheaper to install. In the long run, meter collars are going to become more prevalent because they’re going to allow for bypassing. One of the biggest challenges that electricians face with connecting this equipment is the smart panels. The smart panels are going to also become mainstream. All new homes come equipped with smart panels that allow for that flexible interconnection capability. You don’t have to upgrade your service every time.
David Roberts
Span, the smart panel people, now have a little edge compute box that you can put on there. They’re doing — speaking of edge computing — all this stuff is, everything’s converging. What do utilities need? They need time-of-use tariffs. It seems like GM is doing the management of the system and the awareness of the system. Is it as simple as the utility just coming to GM and saying, “Provide us flexible capacity”? Is that the extent that the utility needs to be involved? The utility doesn’t need to manage these systems itself or technological capability; any utility could do this?
Aseem Kapur
Yeah. The utility doesn’t have to worry about what happens with the resources at the end of the last mile. We take care of that. That’s our promise to the consumer. We’re responsible for deploying the asset, maintaining the asset. That is the brand promise that we’re delivering to the consumer.
What we are partnering with the utility companies on is what they need to have is two things in place. One, they need to have market mechanisms that allow them to run these programs at scale. Most of the programs today are proof of value pilots. They’re not being offered at scale because the regulators have to approve and authorize that they can add these investments into their —
David Roberts
And you just mean variable rates, time-of-use rates.
Aseem Kapur
Tariffs is a piece of it. Another key aspect is if you have to truly incentivize flexible demand, then there’s no better way of doing it than to pay the consumer. Pay the customer for getting into that technology. Now, instead of upgrading the grid, I can call on that asset that I have incentivized the consumers. We are a big proponent that regulation should allow the vehicle-to-home and the home energy management systems to be treated as a regulated asset. Let the utilities add it to their books like they do. In many cases, they have storage systems being added to their books so the utilities can earn. It’s a win- win. The consumer benefits, the grid benefits, and it’s the most affordable way to add grid capacity. That’s one.
David Roberts
But you need them to have confidence in it too. This is what I hear from utilities.
Aseem Kapur
That’s right.
David Roberts
They want it to be as reliable as a power plant. I don’t know that a lot of them are convinced yet.
Aseem Kapur
We’re there. We’re working very closely with them. It’s only a matter of time when all of this testing comes out, and then once one company gets behind it, all the other companies get behind it. Just the nature of how the utility industry works.
The second thing, I just also want to go back to your original question: what must be true for energy companies or utility companies? Interoperability is also key. OEMs like GM are really taking the charge. We’re leaning in, we’re all in with our EVs, but we have to have standardized standards that drive bidirectional charging because that drives interoperability. Right now, the customer can buy a GM Energy home management system. Today it only works with a GM EV, but in the future it should be able to work with any EV or vice versa. That is what drives adoption and scale as well.
Utilities don’t want to be in a position where they say, “We’re only going to issue a flexible capacity contract to General Motors.” They want to be agnostic to technology, they want to be market makers. What we are doing is, and we recognize the opportunity because it’s the right thing to do for our consumers as we did with the NACS port. We agreed that this is in the best interest of the consumer. We’re leaning all in. Similarly, we’re working with the SAE, the IEEE to lean in on these, including partnership with our other automakers to unlock these new bidirectional charging standards.
David Roberts
If I’m a consumer, one worry I might have about this is am I getting locked into a walled garden? If I have one piece of GM equipment, am I then stuck only being able to buy other pieces of GM equipment? Could my battery come from a different manufacturer? Could I use a different EV with your inverter, etc.? To what extent are those standards in place now and this technology agnostic versus that being a future destination?
Aseem Kapur
Let me answer the question on the top. First, I’ll answer it in the context of where the maturity of the standards is. Then I want to answer your question around consumers and how they think about it. There are three standards that must be true. It’s the IEEE standard that’s related around the 1547-2018, which is the inverter technology — how do we make sure every vehicle is capable of inversion either onboard or off-board to the same standard? Today we design our inverter that’s off-board on the wall that satisfies that requirement.
The second is around ISO 15118-20, which is the emerging standard for bidirectional charging. Today our EVs communicate with our home energy management system on a proprietary protocol. In the future, everything that we are going to design — Sterling talked about this in his talk earlier. With model year 28, all of those vehicles will be ISO 15118-20.
The third piece is around the IEEE, the 2030.5 or the OCPP 2.0.1. These are emerging global standards around how charging and discharging happens, how settlement of payments happens, the transaction cost transparency.
All of these standards are — IEEE standard has been finalized, the ISO standard is near finalization, and the ISO standard is probably six months away from becoming the formal source. The product life cycles for the OEMs are going to fast follow. We expect we are going to be the first one out the gate that is going to have all these standards adopted in our vehicle-to-grid technology and vehicle-to-home technology. That is the first part.
Going back to your original question about consumers being locked into the walled garden. The way we think about this is slightly different. Yes, you can have a choice to be able to lock into a walled garden. But there is a reason why people buy Apple devices. It is the same reason why people buy GM vehicles. We have by far the highest brand loyalty of any automaker. Once the customer gets into our brand of products, they trust us with that ownership. It is across the portfolio. We have a vehicle at every price point and we have customers who through generations just buy GM vehicles. We have seen that brand loyalty increases with EV propulsion systems. It is a higher brand loyalty.
We’re not concerned about the fact that today customers are making an investment in a vehicle-to-home or home energy management system. We’re so confident in our EVs that we know that they’re going to come back into another EV from us and trust us with that experience as well.
David Roberts
One thing I hear when I talk to experts about this is that most of the benefits of the grid communicating with EVs, most of the benefits you want in terms of flexibility, you can get through just managed charging, that is, timing when you’re putting electricity into the battery. I saw even on the PG&E pilot there is not yet energy going from the EV to the grid, leaving the home — basically export of energy. Do you think that’s going to be a big piece? Do you think we’re going to get most of the way there on flexibility just with timing, or do you think export into the grid is going to be a big piece of this at some point?
Aseem Kapur
Let me turn that question over to you, Dave. How many outages have you experienced, say, just in the last year?
David Roberts
Probably two, and usually pretty short, usually on the scale of hours.
Aseem Kapur
Would you say they’re increasing or about consistently the same?
David Roberts
I don’t know. I don’t know over time.
Aseem Kapur
The way I would answer the question is in most cases the average US consumer is experiencing more outages than they have over the last decade.
David Roberts
That’s vehicle-to-home. That’s your vehicle in your home.
Aseem Kapur
That’s correct. That’s the first entry point on how the customer gets into the technology. What is also happening is that in many cases, there are short duration outages in many parts of the country, but when there are major weather events, those outages are typically prolonged. They are three to five to seven days.
In most cases, utilities are not equipped to energize communities or neighborhoods at scale and what they’re looking for typically — and in my prior life I worked at Con Ed, I was responsible for at one point in my career powering all of the grid north of Times Square. Every heat wave in the summer we would deploy backup diesel generators because the grid would go out of power. Now imagine there’s a parking garage in every corner in Manhattan. If we have all those EVs that are parked in that garage, that become our vehicle-to-grid enabled technology, that can now become a grid resource that can be dispatched.
David Roberts
But then you need something like a microgrid. You can’t just pour that energy into the whole grid area. You need some sort of isolated —
Aseem Kapur
That’s correct. Where the technology is, again, going back to what we talked about earlier, as the last-mile congestion increases, the frequency of the outages increases and the impact increases. What the utility planners are going to look into is how do we design these circuits to have flexible interconnection with distributed energy resources. It’s already happening with batteries, it’s happening with community solar, it’s happening with community storage. Now utilities in many cases, they’re regulated to do that. The reason why they’re doing that is that they’re purposely reconfiguring portions of the grid to adopt these technologies on a permanent basis.
Why they do that is because they see value, it’s cheaper, and this is a big portion of what the distribution study that we shared with you about how you manage for the distributed energy grid expansion or deferral in capacity. It’s going to come down to: in the past, the technology has not been there. You can have a flexible interconnection point, but then how do you monitor the asset? You are absolutely right. We have to earn the utility operator’s confidence. We are laser focused on doing that. We are making such a large investment in our labs, in our technology, we are running these pilots.
The reason why we’re doing that is because we want to get that confidence, we want to get that approval from the utility operator that your technology is good to go. Beyond that, the tech stack exists right now. It’s a function of what we bring to the table — the consumer we bring to the table. We can do the customer acquisition, we can deliver the most unified experience to them. When an event happens, yes, there is a good probability that between the three of us, not all of us are going to make our vehicle available.
Given the amount of data and information that we have around consumers’ behavior on their driving, behavior on their energy consumption at home, we can forecast with a very high degree of confidence what is the likelihood that one out of three EVs is going to respond at a given circuit, at a given proof point. Once utility operators and utility planners have access to that information, that just changes the game.
Our perspective today is all about how we have designed the grid for 100-plus years. It is unidirectional flow of energy. You have to have an islanded system. I can think of 100 reasons why this will not work. I have been on the other side. The need for change has never been higher and tech is moving at a much faster pace than all of us imagined, even five years ago. That really gives me confidence.
As a utility former planner, I didn’t have the tools to even do the analysis to say when can I project overload in a certain specific circuit? I had to run studies after studies, load flow models, and run a probabilistic scenario for all different load curves, 8760 analysis that we had to do, which is every load curve for every hour in the day. Now you plug that in and Claude could run it for you in a matter of seconds.
David Roberts
Final question. Theoretically, five years from now, ten years from now, you, GM, are going to be running VPPs all across the country. Theoretically, you’re going to be a big power company, you’re going to be a large-scale energy company. I’m curious how deep you all want to go into the VPP or could you see handing that off to someone else? There are all these VPPs popping up, there is a lot of ferment in that market. Do you anticipate eventually managing hundreds of megawatts, gigawatts of power across the country? That would make you a large-scale energy company. Is that the destination here?
Aseem Kapur
Absolutely. There’s no reason for us not to do it if it’s the right thing for the customer. Is that our core competence and expertise today? Absolutely not. What we’re doing is investing in gradually building and learning it step by step. What’s more important is we’re threading an ecosystem. We don’t want to go it all alone. We want to bring the utility companies, we’ll bring the aggregators. The way we see it is if there are certain markets where an aggregator can do that, we’ll partner with them.
If there are other markets where we have to step in and do it, we may do it. The intention is what brings the time to value. How do you energize that capacity and bring that to value? We are laser focused on the core outcome for the customer. We’re not moving forward with the direction that we want to be the largest power company in the world. We are looking at this problem statement in the context of how do we create value for the consumer that gives them confidence in the propulsion system, in the energy technology, in our battery technology, and we continue to scale that.
David Roberts
Thank you. It’s very illuminating. Super interesting stuff. It’s been fascinating to watch as everything becomes batteries — transportation, grid management, home, customer — everything is becoming one. Everything comes on the grid, everything becomes one big thing. It’s muddling all these previous business categories, all these previous silos of different business models are all getting mushed together. It’s fascinating to watch how things are going to fall out of that. What do the businesses look like when they’re managing all these batteries and all these different kinds of categories and all these different — it’s fun to watch. It’s a fun time to be involved.
Aseem Kapur
Exciting time.
David Roberts
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