Dive Brief:

• The Massachusetts Clean Energy Center will deploy 100 bidirectional electric vehicle chargers at no cost to residential, commercial, municipal and school customers as part of a two-year “vehicle-to-everything” demonstration, program partners Resource Innovations and The Mobility House said Feb. 24.
• The demonstration will add an estimated 1.5 MW of distributed energy storage capacity across Massachusetts by September 2026, when MassCEC expects all installations to be completed, Resource Innovations and TMH said.
• Calling the demonstration “a crucial step in Massachusetts’s efforts to enable wide-scale adoption of electric vehicles,” MassCEC Senior Director of Clean Transportation Rachel Ackerman said in a statement that the multi-sector deployment would help identify and resolve barriers to “accelerated application of V2X technology.”

Dive Insight:

The deployment is a “first-of-its-kind statewide [program] to enhance grid resilience, reduce energy costs and increase renewable energy integration across Massachusetts,” Resource Innovations and TMH said last month.

MassCEC expects to install 50 to 60 chargers at single-family residential locations, with a focus on homes located in low-income and disadvantaged communities; 30 to 40 chargers at three to five commercial sites; and 10 to 20 chargers at three school bus storage sites. Participants must own or plan to purchase bidirectional-capable EVs, it says.

The program allows participants to use their vehicles for site backup power, self-consumption and participation in revenue-producing ConnectedSolutions grid events, MassCEC says.

Resource Innovations will provide program design, management, implementation and reporting, while TMH will contribute vehicle-grid integration software, they said.

Program partners Voltrek and B2Q will provide local engineering, site design and construction for residential, commercial and school installations, while Converge Strategies and the Vehicle-Grid Integration Council lead stakeholder engagement and coordination with charging vendors, automakers, community members, local governments and utilities, they said.

The demonstration program is available to Massachuestts customers in Eversource, National Grid, Unitil and municipally-owned electric companies’ territories, Resource Innovations Vice President of Transportation Electrification Practice Kelly Helfrich told Utility Dive.

Following the end of the demonstration period in December 2026, program partners will produce a “public-facing guidebook” to detail lessons learned and next steps, Helfrich said.

A state law signed in November by Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, D, significantly expanded efforts to build out EV charging infrastructure and incentivize EV adoption across the state. Massachusetts aims to have 900,000 EVs on its roads by 2030, up from about 90,000 last year.

Other states have taken steps recently to enable and expand bidirectional EV charging. Last year, Maryland enacted the DRIVE Act, requiring state utilities to submit plans for vehicle-to-grid charging and virtual power plants by April and July of this year, respectively. In Colorado, Xcel Energy, Fermata Energy and local partners are rolling out a vehicle-to-grid charging program in the city of Boulder to examine potential bill impacts and resiliency benefits, Xcel said last year.