Massachusetts wants to pay EV drivers for their battery power

If you own an electric car in Massachusetts, you may soon be able to get paid for letting your car's battery help power the grid. Utilities Eversource and National Grid are adding electric vehicles to ConnectedSolutions, their existing programs that already pay people for using smart thermostats or home batteries to ease strain on the grid during high-demand periods. Now they want to test whether EV batteries can do the same job through what's called vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology, which lets a car send stored electricity back into the grid instead of just drawing power from it.

The catch is that a lot of details are still missing. The utilities haven't said which EV models or bidirectional chargers will qualify, when you'd be able to sign up, or how much you'd actually get paid. Companies including Sunrun and The Mobility House are providing the technology behind the pilot, and National Grid is already testing V2G with electric school buses, while Eversource is talking with school districts about similar programs.

For now, this mainly matters if you own or are considering an EV capable of bidirectional charging and live in Eversource or National Grid territory in Massachusetts. There's no program to join yet, but it's a sign that using your car's battery to earn money or lower grid strain could become a real option in the state, alongside the smart thermostats and home batteries already enrolled in ConnectedSolutions.