Catalyst with Shayle Kann - Can the V2X dream become reality?

Episode Date: August 31, 2023

Here’s the dream: Millions of EVs plugged into their charging docks, working in concert to relieve stress on the world’s power grids. They reduce charging load or even inject energy back onto the grid. They back up renewables when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine.  That’s the vision for managed charging, or V1G, and vehicle-to-grid, or V2G. There’s also a third technology called vehicle-to-home that allows an EV battery to power a building, just like a home battery. Collectively these technologies are called V2X. There’s reason to think this V2X dream could become a reality. They’re already happening at small scales. And when they reach larger scales, the cumulative impact could be big. A recent Nature study found that by 2030 the total battery capacity across the world’s mobile batteries could be more than two terawatt hours, climbing to more than 30 terawatt hours by 2050. But first, these technologies need to overcome some big barriers—costly grid upgrades, degrading batteries, drivers worried about being left without a charge—just to name a few.  So what will V2X actually look like? In this episode, Shayle talks to Ty Jagerson, leader of V2X at GM. They cover topics like: The contracts GM is signing with customers to manage their charging Reassuring EV owners that managed charging is not going to leave them without a charge What kind of compensation EV owners could get for V2G and whether the value to companies will be worth the costs The carrots and sticks of V2G: compensation and time-of-use charges Whether V2G will be more valuable for capacity or energy markets Whether V2G will degrade batteries and violate manufacturer warranties Recommended Resources: Canary Media: Is ​‘vehicle-to-everything’ charging ready for prime time? Union of Concerned Scientists: EVs Can Support Power Grid Reliability and Reduce Costs. Here’s How. Catalyst: Will charging infrastructure be a bottleneck for electric vehicles? Catalyst is a co-production of Post Script Media and Canary Media. Are you looking to understand how artificial intelligence will shape the business of energy? Come network with utilities, top energy firms, startups, and AI experts at Transition-AI: New York on October 19. Our listeners get a 10% discount with the code pspods10. Catalyst is supported by Antenna Group. For 25 years, Antenna has partnered with leading clean-economy innovators to build their brands and accelerate business growth. If you're a startup, investor, enterprise, or innovation ecosystem that's creating positive change, Antenna is ready to power your impact. Visit antennagroup.com to learn more. Catalyst is supported by RE+. RE+ is more than just the largest clean energy event, it’s a catalyst for industry innovation designed to supercharge business growth in the clean energy economy. Learn more: re-plus.com.

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We've hosted a couple of them with Canary. panelists are handpicked by the Canary editorial team, and they'll dive into all things related to the energy transition, the Inflation Reduction Act, technology, and innovation. Drink, eat, socialize with clean energy leaders, investors, inventors, public leaders, and advocates. You can follow the link in the show notes to get your tickets to Canary Live Bay Area today. Transition AI, New York, Canary Live Bay Area. Put them on your fall calendar for October.

We'll see you there. the studios of PostScript Media and Canary Media. I'm Shail Khan, and this is Catalyst. Yeah, the biggest problem at this point in the market's development is just getting people to understand what the heck you're doing, and to get them comfortable that you're not somehow hijacking their car or going to leave them with their vehicle drained sitting as a doorstop in their driveway. So the size of a Tesla power wall, home battery, is 14 kilowatt hours.

Meanwhile, a Tesla Model 3, the vehicle, has a battery as large as 82 kilowatt hours. Or if you want to go really big, a Chevy Silverado, EV, which is coming out soon, will come with a battery pack as large as 200 kilowatt hours. So you do the math on which is going to have the biggest impact on the grid. When utilities need flexible capacity they can count on, they turn to Energy Hub. Energy Hub works with more than 170 utilities, coordinating over 2.5 million devices to manage 3.4 gig. megawatts of flexibility built for the moments when utilities can't afford uncertainty. Energy Hub builds and operates virtual power plants that utilities actually stake their grid planning on, coordinating EVs, batteries, thermostats, and more through a single platform

built for utility scale. Predictive, verifiable, and designed to perform when it counts. Learn more at energy hub.com. Trillions of dollars are flowing into clean and critical infrastructure, but those investments aren't driven by technology alone. They're shaped by markets, by policy. by capital and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, and host of a brand new podcast, Critical Capital.

Each episode, I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy and building the clean economy. Tune in as we unpack how progress is actually made. Listen to Critical Capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Shail Khan. I invest in revolutionary climate technologies and energy impact partners. welcome. So when I think about the impact of electric vehicles on the grid, there's the good and there's the bad. Starting with the bad, uncontrolled charging of electric vehicles at scale could very easily start to overload portions of the distribution grid. It's not hard to imagine, and in fact, there are real examples of neighborhoods with lots of electric vehicles, everyone

charging at the same time during peak hours, and effectively doubling the peak load on that circuit. Now, multiply that by the entire country, and you can imagine the problem. So that's the bad. The good comes in two parts. First, well-managed charging, where EVs soak up excess generation and flatten the overall load curve could actually help make electricity easier to serve and potentially even less costly once levelized. And then the second thing, which is maybe the bigger deal long term, is that EVs have these huge battery packs, much larger than most home batteries that people are starting to use for backup power.

So what do you do with them? Do you offer resilience for the home? Should they discharge into the grid? Is it actually worthwhile for the customer? This nexus, how to best manage and leverage EV batteries, falls under the umbrella bucket of V-da-X or vehicle tax. In some ways, it's an amalgamation of independent markets, but since they're all using the same asset, the EV battery at the same time while it is plugged in, they're worth considering together. And that is the job of our guest this week, Ty Yeagerson. Ty is the VitaX lead at General Motors. And with no further ado, here's Ty. Ty, welcome. Phil, very glad to be here. Thanks for having me. This is on my bucket list. Let's start here. We're going to talk about Vita X, which is a term people throw around to mean a bunch of

different things. You actually have the term in your title, Vita X is in your title at GM. So what does it mean to you? Yeah, it's a, it's a good question. It can mean different things to different folks. For us, VitaX is really the business associated with what you can do with your car when it's plugged in and the associated technologies and user experience. A lot of folks that are just poking around in this space can get confused about V to X on the electricity side versus V to X for the communication side for vehicle to vehicle communications or vehicle the streetlight communications. That's also V to X. But this is just on the energy side, just when it's plugged in, just when it's not moving.

Okay. And I like that frame. So things you can do with an electric vehicle when it is plugged in. So when I think about that, I think about three high-level categories. and I'm curious whether there are others that I haven't thought of. Those three being V1G or managed charging, depending on how you want to define it, you can schedule when you charge and don't charge the vehicle. Second being V2G, which is discharge the vehicle into the grid. And the third being V to H, which is discharge the vehicle into the home or I guess into a building generally for backup resilience purposes.

Are there others that I'm missing, or are those the three main categories as you think about it? Those are the three main categories. People are also connecting vehicle to load, and that can be when you're plugged in or not, and you've got vehicle the building versus vehicle, the other types of infrastructure, which is sort of a mash-up of V-2-G and V-2-H, but basically those are the right categories.

I will say, as an aside, I don't know, maybe a year ago, there was, I think, a doctor on Twitter in Texas, who had, I think it was a Ford F-150 lightning, that is capable of doing V-to-H. And they had an outage in Texas, and he used the vehicle to power his lab. He happens to do vasectomies, so he called it V-to-V,

which is a category I hadn't heard before, but one that we probably don't need to talk about a whole lot right now. It's a wonder that they don't put that in more TV advertisements, advertising that Ford capability. That's right. I think we'll see more and more stories about creative uses of the power you can get from these vehicles.

I actually think that is true, right? These are big batteries, and people are just the capability to use them for things, like using the power work sites or whatever. Like, these are all new. But we'll focus on the three we talked about, starting with the one that is most straightforward or at least most immediate, which is the V1G managed charging world. So how do you think about that world as it stands today in the sort of early days of VV adoption here? Yeah, I think all three.

those different categories are, you know, we're still relatively early days. In the V1G category, we actually have a half dozen programs in place right now where we've partnered with utilities and we're using these vehicles that are already in the field in customers' hands and we're helping them use the vehicles to manage the load on the grid. The way we do that is we get the vehicle owners to pre-agree on a compensated basis to participate in these programs. and then when the utilities have a grid event, either on the spot or planned a day or two in advance, we'll send a note to the vehicle owners,

typically through the My Brand app, so the My Chevy or the My Buick app or whatever, the stuff they use every day, saying, hey, do you mind if we delay your charging tomorrow at 2 p.m., and that's part of the program you've agreed to participate in? If they can, great. If they can't, they can always cancel that particular event. But the critical thing here is that this is driving one of the most important parts of this technology,

which is the UI and the UX that creates a reasonable expectation and a comfort for participating in these programs on the part of the customer. That's an important hurdle to get over because this is new stuff for people, and it takes them a while to get their head around how it works. Yeah, to that point, one of the things I've wondered, I think what distinguishes this category, V1G from the other two we're going to talk about is that the other two are, sort of nice to have. They're like cool things you can do with the vehicle when it's when it's plugged in. This one is a need to have. If we don't figure out managed charging, then there's basically no way EVs scale up to the scale that we need them to. And clearly, there are lots of different ways permutations you could invent for how to introduce this to customers, how much to make

it mandatory versus optional, and then how to compensate them for it. And I'm curious in the early days is what you're seeing in terms of what it takes to get high adoption from customers. How much do we have to pay them? Are there clever things being done in terms of how to compensate? Like, what works here? Yeah, I think there's a lot of clever stuff being done in the space just because none of it's been done before, and everyone's just kind of trying to figure it out on the fly.

The biggest problem at this point in the market's development is just getting people to understand what the heck you're doing and to get them comfortable that you're not somehow hijacking their car car or going to leave them with their vehicle drained sitting as a doorstop in their in their driveway. And so there's a lot of education that goes into just getting people comfortable with it. The compensation side is interesting because on one hand, people are just tickled at the very idea of getting paid to provide the option for this charging curtailment to happen. but also it's a particular vehicle owner that's available to participate in these programs

we're running because it's all bolt owners at this point for us. And the demographic of people buying bolts is very different than the folks who are going to be buying the first Silveradoes coming out, first EV Silverado is coming out later this year. So you have educational requirements that are just not going to be relevant, you know, three or four years from now. And we haven't really tested the economics of what's going to be. compelling for folks going forward. But I also think that eventually

the adoption rates for this stuff are going to be high just because I think it's going to be very widely accepted and everyone's going to know that they're going to get a little bit of trickle cash coming through these functions and people will just be doing it generally. I think there's some question marks around, you know, how is that going to work with the CAPEX associated

with V2G versus V1G? And we can talk about that. But I wholly agree with you that this is not an optional if we're going to get to the penetration levels of renewables we're looking for and the penetration levels of EVs we're looking for because the system's going to crack if we're not thoughtful and aggressive

about these dynamics. Yeah, the way I think about it is that ultimately there's going to be some combination of carrot and stick here. There's a little bit of both of them now, but for most customers, it's mostly carrot at this point. Let us compensate you a little bit for your managed charging. ultimately if that doesn't work well enough, it becomes mostly stick, and that's going to come in the form of time-of-use charges that are going to become really punitive if you're charging your vehicle at the wrong time.

I think that's right. My guess is that what we're going to see before too long is utility programs or state subsidy programs where your charging capacity or your utility rates are going to be charged relative to your participation in these types of programs. If you think about what's going to happen, like I remember when I was at Google and we were doing some early test demos of grid monitoring and EVs, we went to the city of Palo Alto utility. And they were like, you can't put another charger on this street. There's already two chargers on this street.

Like, what do you mean? Like, well, it costs us, you know, $50,000 to put a new pole transformer upgrade at the end of the street. So like no more EV chargers. I remember that time thinking, like, this system is just not set up for this type of adoption, but it is set up for this type of adoption if the hardware and the software and the vehicles and the user experience are tightly aligned. And that's really what the industry is really gearing up for is how do you do this wisely so that it's an enhancement to the grid as opposed to a destabilizing function for the grid?

Right. So I think clearly one way or another, a combination of carrot and stick, like V1G is inevitable. It's going to happen. It's going to come in lots of different forms. There are many permutations of it, right? Like timing of it and length and what are you actually asking customers to do? And how do you get them to sign up and all those things?

But this one seems inevitable. The other two, I guess, are a little less proven at this point. So I think for that reason, in part, more interesting to talk about. You alluded to the tradeoffs with V2G, But let's just talk about, like, what have been the hesitations historically about V2G? There's been a lot of skepticism about it, I think, that seems to be morphing a little bit in real time. Yeah, there's a bunch of things. One is just the public perception about the public perception, and are people going to be willing to let you do this?

I kind of put that in the same category as range anxiety. I think technology is solving that problem as kind of a Y2K thing. Like, just time will deal with that, and people will be less. worried about it. But I think also that people are willing to try things when they see that it's in their financial benefit to do so. And they're really going to be jumping on top of this because it's going to make sense for them. What about the, I mean, the other area of skepticism historically has been, if you're going to discharge your vehicle battery into the grid, are you going to degrade the battery. So are you going to have a shorter lifetime on the battery and or are you going

to avoid the warranty on the battery? And those have been fairly significant areas of hesitation, I think. Yeah, there are big areas of hesitation. And we've looked a lot at that. And I think the consensus is that, first of all, the batteries are all getting better. And also people's understanding of how these V to G programs are going to work is also getting much more sophisticated. So a lot of that early analysis was based on batteries with less resilient life cycles. But more importantly, they were based on largely on calculations that a V2G program participation meant you were going to be slamming this thing, 100% up and down, and fully discharging and charging twice a day. That's just not how it's going to work. I mean, this is, the value of these batteries

is going to be more in the power than in the energy. And it's going to be more in the power. And it's to be more in the capacity than in the KWH, right? So you're going to have, the value is that these things are going to be available and, you know, maybe sometimes used for a little bit of peak shaving, but not for gunning the whole thing up and down in most cases. Now, in some cases, that might be, that might be what's going on if you're in a really stressed part of the grid, but we'll be able to track that and we'll know way ahead of time whether or not the charge. charging activity is remotely at risk for impinging on the warranty requirements. And if you're making that much money, which you will be, if the grid is really that needy

for all that power, then there will be a financial option for people to opt out of the warranty or buy an upgrade or whatever it is. But the financial circumstances will reward that, and we just got to figure that out. There's an interesting point in there that you should think of those, think of batteries from the grid's perspective, EV batteries from the grid's perspective, as being more of a capacity resource than an energy resource, which means basically they may not be discharging all the time, except for in those cases, like you said, that they're in a particularly stressed part of the grid,

but the grid can count on them being there when they need it, or when the grid needs it, rather. Which is an interesting point when you think about an electric vehicle battery, right? I mean, batteries alone have struggled to get capacity value in electricity markets, even stationary batteries, because it's been a problem, to get grid operators sort of comfortable with the notion that they can be counted on and available as a capacity resource. A mobile battery presumably is even more difficult to count on in that regard. Do I know for sure that this person's going to be home with sufficient capacity

and their battery to charge? I assume the way that you get around that is an aggregate, right? And you just assume that across a large enough aggregation of vehicles, some of them will be there, but like, how much do we still have to prove in terms of being able to quantify the capacity value of these batteries? Yeah, if you look at statistically how reliable any given vehicle is going to be, any given vehicle, you can't count on it at all. But, you know, we're going to be putting millions of vehicles out in the field, and so are other companies. And it doesn't take too long before, you know, that's gigawatts of power. And it doesn't take too long before, you know, that's gigawatts of power. and it doesn't take too long before you'll strike this relatively functional balance of real capacity

and real customer response time so you'll be able to know what it is. A coal plant is what, like, I don't know, 80, 90% uptime and reliability if you call on it in a certain time zone. Well, if you've got a million vehicles and you've got a track record on how those vehicles perform over the last 20 events, It's kind of like thermostats. I think probably 10 years ago, people were saying thermostats just foundationally are not dispatchable resources. And now we know that, well, if you have a million thermostats and you've done it 20 times, then actually it's more dispatchable than a discrete peaking resource. And I think you're going to find that with vehicles as well.

It's going to be very fungible. It's going to be very predictable. We're going to know exactly where they are in the grid. And people say, like, well, they're going to move around. Geez, yeah, they're going to move around and they're going to move around in a way that's predictable. And for those use cases or capacities, which are slightly less reliable,

they'll just be a different discount variable on that capacity pricing. Virtual power plants are becoming a reliable way for utilities to manage capacity. But enrolling devices is just the start. What really matters is confidence, knowing those resources will perform when dispatched and being able to prove it

from the control room to the living room. Energy Hub's platform, handles the full picture, from near real-time forecasting, locational dispatch, and the kind of rigorous verification that holds up when regulators, grid operators, or leadership ask, did it deliver? Easy enrollment creates momentum, proven performance builds trust. That's why more than 170 utilities rely on Energy Hub to manage over 2.5 million devices delivering 3.4 gigawatts of flexible capacity. See what that looks like at energyhub.com. We're living through a profound economic shift, and energy sits at the center of all of it.

Trillions of dollars are flowing into power plants, transmission lines, battery factories, data centers, but the future of energy isn't shaped by technology alone. It's shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, the capital platform for the clean economy. Join me for my brand new show, Critical Capital, as I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy and building projects. Together, we unpack how risk is priced, how incentives are structured, and how progress is actually made. Listen to critical capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. The other question with V2G, which is also, we talked about it with V1G, but I think it's probably

even more of a question here is, is compensation and value to the customer? Because there's obviously a difference between asking the customer, can I delay your charging three hours at 2 p.m. tomorrow versus can I discharge your battery into the grid, and thus you will actually have less charge in the battery until we recharge it. What do we know about compensation requirements for V2G? And is there enough juice there? Like, is the value to the grid sufficient to pay for whatever that compensation is going to be required to the customer, plus whatever margin, you know, the intermediary, be a GM or somebody else, is going to command in the middle?

Yeah, this is one of my favorite thinking points around V to G, which is that a lot of people think, like, well, okay, there's X value in a certain vehicle or a certain market of vehicles for V1G, and if you can reverse the charge, well, then it's twice as valuable. But it's actually not twice as value, but it's much more than twice as valuable. If you think about V1G value, it's only a NegaWa capacity if the vehicle is, not charged. And a lot of times what happens, people bring their vehicle someplace, they plug it in and it's charged. And so you've got, you've got basically negawatt capacity for as long as it's sitting

there either charging or maybe about to be charging. But if you have V-2-G, then it's basically it's got capacity in some form available for the entire time that it's plugged in. Because most of the time you'll be able to take a little bit of power out and you can also defer from a potential charge happening. And so if you think about, there's me, you know, for V1G, there's millions of cars out there, a very large percentage of which are not useful to agree at all because they're already charged. So it's not just double.

It's like, and the math can be done several ways, but it's really three or four times as valuable for a given vehicle. So in my mind, V1G is valuable. because it allows us to craft these pathways through which we can track the data, track the economics, get customers comfortable with the very idea of their grid being a fun, their vehicle being a fungible grid asset. And then from the customer perspective, it's just not that much of a bigger leap to go from V1G to V2G, even though it's a bigger technical leap.

It's just like, hey, you know, the emotional impact of, hey, tomorrow, Tomorrow at 2pm, do you mind if I make sure you're not charging versus, hey, tomorrow at 2 p.m., I'm going to take you down from 100% to 80% or 80% to 75% or something, and I'm going to throw you a 10 spot. Is that cool? That, for me, is really where the impact comes in here. When I think of the impact of the vehicles on the grid, it's really what you can do with the V2G that really gives it that exponential pop. Where are we in the development of that V2G as a market? Like V1G, you said you've got half a dozen programs around the country. I mean, there are dozens of them out there. It's happening. Often at times, their pilot programs and so on.

But it's pretty widespread, at least across the U.S. Where are we with V2G? So there have been some pilots going on with V2G. We've demonstrated our vehicles in V2G mode. We don't have any programs going with utilities for V2GMO, but I think the expectation in the industry is that what happens is these existing programs with utilities just roll right into V2G programs. And so, you know, there are additional hardware requirements,

and so you've got to have that commensurate additional economic benefit. And partly for that reason, I think you're going to see a geographic distribution of these programs that is energy market driven. You know, when you look at the economic value of V1G or a V2G vehicle, it's a function of the energy prices and the volatility in a given market. So high renewables and hence high volatility markets are going to be the places where you're going to see not just V1G but V2G. And then you're also going to see spiky activity in states where they incentivize this ahead of other states.

You've been watching this field for as long as anybody, and all of a sudden some state comes out of nowhere, and all of a sudden they're the hotspot for a given technology. We'll see that happening here as well. I do remember that in the early days of solar, particularly for distributed solar, right? There'd be like state, random state X would suddenly introduce some rebate program for residential solar.

$5 a watt. Exactly. It would get filled up in like 20 minutes, and then all of a sudden it would pop and be like the largest market for a month until the subsidy. he ran out. Yeah, we used to have sales folks go and hang out at City Hall waiting for the rebates to open.

There'd be like a long line. It'd be like a fancy concert and people like queuing up outside to get this crazy rebates the next day. Yeah, exactly. Talk a little bit more about the hardware requirements. I mean, that is one difference. Well, I guess on both sides, like what, from a technology standpoint, what is required in order to do manage charging and what is required in order to do fee to G because they're

sort of different? Yeah, so for managed charging, all you need to do is be able to tell, you need to be able to stop the charging. And so you can do that through the charging equipment or you can do telematics through the vehicle. And depending on who you're talking to in the industry, you know, one is the perfect answer and the other or the other is the perfect answer. I think our perspective is you get the most flexibility if you can control it on the car because the car is going to go different places. and you could, you know, one point of connection gives you V1G capabilities anywhere you go. So technically V1G is pretty simple on that front. With V2G, you have, now you've got power flowing backwards into a source that might otherwise normally just be, you know, flowing energy out.

So you need to have that shut off capability and you need to have a system which is engineered to be able to allow. bi-directional power flow, at least at that point of interconnection. So there is additional complexity there. One of the things that we're seeing is that the places where there's a strongest interest for V-2-G, you're already going through a process where maybe you're adding some additional storage at the building and oftentimes being paired with solar, which really gives you these really powerful positive feedback loops between the solar the on-site storage and the vehicle storage,

which really provides some nice benefits in terms of resilience and cost-effectiveness. And that helps to fray the cost of the V-2-G if you were doing a V-to-G-G-only solution for just the vehicle. That's a good segue, actually, into the third category, which is VTAH or Vehicle to Building or something like that, because, as you said, lots of folks are installing

stationary batteries to provide resilience or backup or something like that. Lots of the same folks are buying electric vehicles, which have much, much larger batteries that are sitting there generally unutilized and could provide much more backup power potentially. And so the promise of V to H or whatever we want to call it is why do you need the stationary battery?

You've got a much bigger battery in your vehicle. If you're willing to give up on some range, which we should probably talk about, then in the event of an outage, user vehicle to power the home. How high a priority is that for you guys? So it's a really high priority for us to be able to deliver a full home solution for our vehicle customers. And that is what we're going to be rolling out with the Silverado is you'll be able to pick up not just the storage, but all the additional charging infrastructure, but also solar

through our Sun Power partnership. And so you'll be able to get a full home ecosystem with the vehicle. And I think that's really important for folks. I think the number of times people use V to H is going to be low. The amount of emotional equity that they put in the comfort of having a home that's resilient, and for some people it matters also if it's renewably powered. But it's amazing how much zeitgeist there is around vehicles powering your home and that sort of providing this dramatic enhancement to resilience for the homeowner. And it's real. Like the number of outages we have around the country, and you guys have done a lot of segments on this around, you know, the aging grid now with, you know, a lot more volatile resources on

it, more climate change. There's just a lot of. going to be more outages. And I think, you know, everyone going out and getting a generator is not the solution. This is going to be a very compelling solution, and it sort of matches the needs of the time. So I think it's going to be very powerful, and that's why we're putting a lot of time and energy into coming up with a really cool package that offers that. In your mind, ultimately, does it displace stationary batteries used for resilience? Is there any reason why you'd still want your need a power wall or whatever it might be if you've, you've got five times the capacity in your vehicle that you can use? Yeah, people still want to be able to drive their car. When the zombie apocalypse hits or a hurricane or something else,

you still got to go out and buy bread or do what you've got to do. And it's not ideal for the, it's not ideal that, you know, your refrigerator turns off when someone, you know, drives down to get new sandbags or whatever for the home. But I think also the other benefit of the battery is that when the vehicle isn't there, your battery is earning its salary by being this load management asset and doing other grid balancing stuff. And if you've got solar, then you're aware of all the different legal challenges coming up to some of the solar pricing structures around the country. Those actually enhance the economic value of batteries.

So the battery installation is really an important sort of workhorse for the home energy management ecosystem. And as more and more municipalities move towards electrification mandates, that just becomes even more critical. So I think economics are generally moving very powerfully in favor of home batteries with or without V2G. And again, the combination of those tombs is those two is particularly compelling. stepping back, I guess. So, presuming we like all three of these categories ultimately, and we think that people who have EVs in the long term will probably need to do some managed charging. They'll maybe want to do some vehicle to grid, and they will certainly like to be able to back up their home with their vehicle if they can. You know, my presumption is these are not ultimately three separate markets.

This is one holistic managed charging thing. So I have my vehicle and I'm interacting with somebody and somebody is sort of in the background trying to figure out any given time what I should be doing with that battery if it's plugged in. How do you think about the ecosystem around that ultimately? What is the role that OEMs like GM should play? Who else needs to be in that ecosystem? Where do we land from a market structure perspective? Yeah, that's a great question.

This is still a very early market. There's a lot of folks out there that are, developed a big name for it. But the space is just going to grow and grow, and there's a lot of folks that want a piece of it. You've got competitors ranging from, you know, the solar companies want to get more of a piece. The generaics of the world, they're like, wait, we're the storage people. And so everything should be coming through us. You got, you know, Google and Amazon who are out there trying to say, like, wait a minute, we're the home communications, interface people. So all those devices really need to be coming through Siri or Alexa or whatever else.

And then you've got, you know, umpteen home energy management, standalone independent device company. So I think it's really an outstanding question as to what that final structure looks like. But I think the reason that there's so much push for this is I don't think that every home is going to have five or six home energy management apps. You're just not going to do it. You're not going to you're not going to set. you know, availability on your refrigerator's capacity to one utility and then have, you know,

your CCA take the capacity on the, on the, on your vehicle and all those things have to talk to each other and be managed basically as a homogenous load. So, so the, you know, that suggests that there's going to be a lot of participants and not that many interfaces between the customer and the energy market, whether that's utility or some other aggregated market transaction. There's a funny analogy we use

on my team, which is you ever see Hunger Games? Sure. You know, Hunger Games, and the hero and everyone comes up and they're up on those pillars and everyone's sort of looking around at each other and everyone's trying to figure out

what's going to happen out in the field. Well, I think we're, kind of at that stage of the market where everybody has to both compete with each other, but also cooperate with each other. And that's what you're seeing. Like, we have an enormous amount of partnerships. And we're building more and more because no one's going to be able to do everything. And so you have to have an open ecosystem where you're pairing with folks to make sure your

customer is getting the best experience and then making sure that you're participating in a win. We are, our solutions have to work wherever our vehicles work. And that's everywhere. And we're not, we're not going to provide the same amount of functionality every location. But the vehicle still has to be able to capture that benefit, and we have to make sure they get it. I assume you're the Katniss Everdeen in that metaphor? We represent the common good across that ecosystem of picking specific characters. Yeah.

All right. Well, this is very illuminating. and these are all markets or ultimately one unified market that is going to develop, I think, quickly over the coming years. So we'll have much more to talk about. But in the meantime, Ty, thank you so much for doing this. Shell, thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. Ty Yegerson is the V-to-X lead at General Motors.

This show is a co-production of PostScript Media and Canary Media. You can head over to canarymedia.com for links to topics on today's show. PostScript is supported by Prelude Ventures, a venture capital firm that partners with entrepreneurs to address climate change, across a range of sectors, including advanced energy, food and ag, transportation and logistics, advanced materials in manufacturing, and advanced computing. This episode was produced by Daniel Waldorf, mixing by Roy Campanella and Sean Marquand, theme song by Sean Marquand. I'm Shail Khan, and this is Catalyst.