HWNEWS
Your EV can already power your house. The paperwork is the problem.
A 120 home California pilot is testing bidirectional EV charging. The hardware is easy. Permitting, inspection, and utility interconnection are not.
A 120 home California pilot is testing bidirectional EV charging. The hardware is easy. Permitting, inspection, and utility interconnection are not.
Frances Bell's lights stayed on through a recent Oakland blackout. The refrigerator kept cold, the Wi-Fi kept running, and the source of that backup power sat in the driveway: a Kia EV9 paired with a Wallbox Quasar 2 bidirectional DC charger, installed by Bidirectional Energy, the company Bell runs as chief executive. The hardware works. The rules around it mostly do not.
That gap is what a state-funded California pilot of roughly 120 homes is now trying to close, and the friction it keeps hitting is not technological. As Canary Media's Jeff St. John reported on Tuesday, the equipment that lets an EV push power back into a house and out onto the grid is, in Bell's framing, essentially the same kind of device as the inverters that already tie rooftop solar and home batteries to a home's electrical panel. What stands between a working car-as-battery and a normal one is permitting, inspection, and a utility's willingness to sign off on an interconnection agreement that lets power flow both ways.
The pilot's purpose, then, is bureaucratic as much as it is electrical. By paying for the equipment and installations and putting real homes through the inspection process across California cities and counties, the program is producing a playbook: the standards, checklists, and tariff language that local building departments, electrical inspectors, and investor-owned utilities can copy. Bell's household is the proof point. The permitting and inspection steps her Oakland project navigated are the artifact other jurisdictions can adapt, and Bidirectional Energy is outfitting more homes across the state to add to that pattern.
It is overdue work. California is the country's largest EV market, yet decades of bidirectional-charging pilots have not produced a single large-scale program in regular operation, per Canary Media's reporting. The hardware is real, but it is also narrow: only a small set of vehicles and chargers sold in the United States can do bidirectional DC charging at all, and the Kia EV9 and Wallbox Quasar 2 sit inside that short list. Programs like this one currently function because state funding covers the gap between a niche enthusiast product and a realistic option for a homeowner. The rules that govern whether the power can leave the car, leave the house, and reach the grid remain a patchwork that varies city by city, county by county, and utility by utility.
That patchwork is the actual story. Bidirectional Energy is one of a small set of companies trying to compress decades of fragmented pilots into a working template, and the California program's first year of installs will show whether the playbook can travel outside the state. The open question for regulators and utilities elsewhere is whether they are willing to adopt the same forms, inspection steps, and tariff structures. If they do, the batteries already parked in American driveways become a usable resource for the grid. If they do not, the cars stay what they are today: heavy, expensive, and stuck running in one direction.