The leaders of a new EV charging program at the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) envision a future where, in the case of a blackout, an electric bus discharges its battery and keeps the lights on and air conditioning running at school.
To figure out exactly how to make this a reality, MassCEC is launching a “V2X Demonstration Program”—that’s “vehicle to everything”—in which it’ll set up 100 households, businesses, and schools with charging equipment and software to take advantage of technology that enables EVs to send electricity to buildings and the power grid.
“As we expect an increasing demand for electricity in the coming years, this could really be a silver-bullet solution,” Elijah Sinclair, senior program manager of clean transportation at MassCEC, told Tech Brew.
Climate goals: MassCEC is a quasi-governmental economic development agency whose mission is to speed up clean energy growth amid Massachusetts’ push to be “the global leader in climate tech.”
MassCEC has a team dedicated to accelerating decarbonization, with a subset focused on transportation. Sinclair said the teams “find technologies that are market-ready but haven’t quite taken off.”
The V2X program, he explained, is one of four programs focused on EV charging as part of a broader state effort “to figure out how we’re going to deploy EV charging equitably across the state.” State leaders’ goal is to have 900,000 EVs on the road by 2030.
“We’re really trying to tackle some of the biggest barriers with electric vehicle charging across the state,” Sinclair said. Vehicle-to-grid tech “can make electric vehicles an asset that are profitable for the owners and also provide resilience in case the grid goes down. I think that’s a pretty exciting proposition on both ends that can really help spur adoption across the state and potentially the country.”
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The program is backed by federal funding that Sinclair said MassCEC must use by the end of 2026. The goal is to get the infrastructure ready to go by the end of this winter so the team can collect data throughout 2026.
“We fully expect to deploy the program as planned,” he said.
V2X: One of the program’s goals, Sinclair said, is to make sense of a “really confusing” market.
“There’s a lot we need to figure out, a lot of basics,” he said. “So right now we’re going to collect as much of that as we can and bring all the right people in the room, make sure it works so there’s a pathway for people to continue scaling this technology.”
MassCEC worked closely with numerous utilities across the state, as well as with nonprofits, vehicle manufacturers, and other stakeholders to get the word out to potential participants, final selections of which MassCEC is working on now.
The program got more applicants than it can accept, Sinclair said, which means program leaders were able to home in on “tricky and interesting use cases that will help us advance the market,” such as helping EV owners figure out how to best take advantage of state programs like Connected Solutions, which provides compensation to users who send power back to the grid during high demand periods.
Despite the Trump administration’s rollback of federal support for electrification and clean energy, Sinclair expressed confidence that MassCEC will be able to push ahead with this program and other decarbonization efforts.
“It’s been awesome having the federal support,” he said. “And whether or not we have that in the future, I think we’ll still make meaningful progress toward our goals in the next few years.”