PG&E Opens Its V2X Pilot to dcbel and Wallbox, While California’s Bidirectional Grant Is $9 Million
- EVs Infrastructure & Grid Connection News
Marin Holt
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- REDWDS driver ceiling: $3,200 per vehicle per year
- Equipment incentive: up to $13,800
- CEC first-phase funding: $9 million
- Massachusetts program: up to $1,300 a year
PG&E has widened its residential vehicle-to-everything pilot to accept bidirectional chargers from dcbel and Wallbox. Tesla, General Motors and Ford with Sunrun were already approved. The dcbel Ara Home Energy Station pairs with the Nissan Leaf from 2018 through 2025, the 2025 Volvo EX90 and the 2025 Polestar 3. The Wallbox Quasar 2 covers the Kia EV9 from 2024 and the Kia EV6 from 2025. PG&E describes the effort as a study of how residential customers turn parked cars into backup batteries and grid assets.
The advertised return is the part that travels. Microgrid Knowledge reported on August 26 on the Responsive, Easy Charging Products with Dynamic Signals program, known as REDWDS. Drivers, companies and school districts in it earn up to $3,200 per year per vehicle, according to dcbel. The payment comes from exporting energy back to the grid. REDWDS participants also receive up to $13,800 toward charging equipment. Massachusetts runs a smaller program through MassCEC, which a dcbel sales director put at up to $1,300 a year in savings.
Those are company figures, and no hardware has moved yet. Dcbel had not shipped a single system under any of the three pilot programs as of that report. It expected its first installation within weeks. The headline number is a ceiling for a driver who exports often, not an average payment.
The state money behind REDWDS is smaller than the per-driver figures suggest. The California Energy Commission solicitation GFO-22-609 made up to $9 million available for the first phase of work. A second phase of up to $300 million sits behind it. The commission calls that money potentially available in the future, not awarded.
Eligibility is the other limit. Each incentive attaches to a named charger paired with a named model year. The published pairing lists stop at specific years. A vehicle outside those lists earns nothing through this route, however capable its battery. That is a narrow gate for a program whose headline number gets quoted as though it applied to any electric car in the state.
Why It Matters
Utilities keep testing whether parked EVs work as grid assets, and the per-driver headlines keep outrunning the committed budgets. The first phase of state money is a fraction of a second phase that nobody has been awarded. The pilots that end up mattering are the ones that survive into a tariff, where payments come from the rate base instead of a grant cycle. Everything here is still a pilot, the vehicle lists are short, and the first unit has yet to ship.
Critical Perspective
Set the incentive against the pot it comes from. If the entire $9 million first phase went to equipment at the stated $13,800 ceiling, it would cover about 650 installations across California. That is a rounding error against a state vehicle fleet counted in millions, and it puts the second phase in perspective. The $300 million that has not been awarded is 33 times the money actually in hand.
The equipment subsidy also says something about the underlying economics. At $13,800 for hardware and $3,200 as the annual ceiling for a driver who exports often, the incentive equals about 4.3 years of the best case payment. A driver earning less than the ceiling waits longer than that before the hardware pays for itself unsubsidized. Both figures come from the vendor rather than from the commission, and no system had shipped under any of the three pilots when they were quoted. Until units are installed and metered, the payment is a projection, not a result.
