Between 10 and 15 chargers are now installed and awaiting authorization to begin bidirectional charging. The rest are expected to be online by September.
Already, some challenges have been identified. The most pressing, speakers at the event said, have to do with finding a financial model that works.
For one, the systems are pricey: $15,000 to $40,000 for a residential setup, the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center estimates. Pilot programs can help defray costs for small numbers of users for a limited time, but a long-term, reliable compensation plan is needed to get any meaningful number of EV owners to make the leap.
But it turns out those compensation programs can be tricky to design. In Massachusetts, one major discovery so far has been the conflict between state solar incentives and the ConnectedSolutions program, which compensates battery owners for sending power onto the grid. Existing technology can’t tell the difference between electrons sent from solar panels and those coming from batteries. For a home with both solar panels and a bidirectional charger, it would be impossible to separate the solar power that should receive net-metering incentives from the EV battery power that would receive payment from ConnectedSolutions.
The Massachusetts Clean Energy Center had to immediately disqualify roughly 75% of the nearly 300 residential applicants for the V2X program because their homes had solar power, said Elijah Sinclair, the center’s senior program manager.
The state was aware there might be a conflict, but the scale took program planners by surprise, delaying the selection of participants and therefore the deployment of chargers.
One possible answer could lie in a program that compensates virtual power plants — networks of distributed energy resources like solar panels, batteries, and demand management — rather than providing different incentives for each component of the system, Steve Letendre, senior adviser at the Vehicle-Grid Integration Council, an EV charging advocacy group, told event attendees.
“We believe it’s a mechanism by which we can bring EVs onto the grid in a way that maximizes their value,” he said.
An unexpected bright spot so far has been the ease of interconnection, the process of formalizing agreements with utilities for hooking up an energy resource to the grid, Sinclair said.
“Utility interconnection was expected to be a big barrier,” he said. “But everyone has been just awesome to work with, and interconnection hasn’t slowed us down.”
The Massachusetts Clean Energy Center will collect data from participants for the rest of the year. By the end of the year, it aims to publish a comprehensive guidebook on what it’s learned about the cost, system design, and technical and regulatory barriers, with the goal of helping other agencies and states replicate the program.
In the meantime, the students and bus drivers of Acton-Boxborough will be enjoying quieter rides without any diesel fumes, said Crosby, the district energy manager.
“We are improving their quality of life immediately, and helping to create a cleaner, more stable future for them,” she said. “There’s nothing that matters more to us.”
