Duke Energy is looking at new ways customers in Florida may one day be able to use two-way, or bidirectional, charging from electric vehicles to power their own homes during outages and to help support the power grid.
According to a press release, Duke Energy will launch a research and development pilot program in the state to test and evaluate the viability of the new Ford F-150 Lightning all-electric truck's high-capacity batteries as a grid edge resource that could help transform the energy system.
As part of the pilot, Duke Energy will add approximately five Ford F-150 Lightning trucks to its Florida fleet and perform additional testing of the technology, with a focus on leveraging homes that have solar energy and stationary storage. Using the Ford Charge Station Pro and Intelligent Backup Power Home Integration System's bidirectional charging infrastructure, the company will perform extensive testing using the vehicles to feed and draw energy from the power grid. Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) integration will push and pull energy between the connected electric trucks and the grid in a bidirectional energy flow.
The pilot will focus on real-world use cases with the Ford F-150 Lightning to benefit the grid – such as how the vehicle interacts with other customer-owned distributed energy resources (like rooftop photovoltaic – or PV – solar and customer home batteries), how the truck's battery performs powering customers' homes during an outage, how the vehicles will be used to feed the grid during peak times of use, and how such usage might impact the trucks' batteries over time.
With the F-150 Lightning, Ford introduced Intelligent Backup Power, a feature that when purchased with the necessary installation equipment can allow customers to power their homes for up to 10 days during a power outage, all from the vehicle's battery. Sunrun, one of the nation's leading home solar panel and energy storage companies, is the preferred installer for F-150 Lightning home charging solutions and will contribute to the charging and Intelligent Backup Power infrastructure for the Ford-150 Lightning.