A fleet of 74 school buses have spent the last two years powering about a thousand homes, taking stress off the grid, thanks to V2G chargers built in America.

If you’ve spent much time around the electric vehicle space, you may have heard about vehicle-to-grid, perhaps by the acronym V2G (or its cousins, V2H/V2L/V2X, etc).

The basic idea is: if we’re looking to add batteries to the grid or to homes to increase stability and smooth out demand, why don’t we use the massive amounts of batteries available inside electric vehicles for that purpose?

The idea has been talked about for years, but for the most part has not reached wide adoption. The California Energy Commission estimates that V2H could save homeowners a few hundred dollars per summer, and cut peak demand by up to 5GW statewide if it was broadly implemented. But to do this with consumer EVs, homes would mostly need some sort of costly equipment added, and most EVs aren’t V2G-enabled (though that may be changing).

But for fleet EVs, installation can be a lot easier. Putting V2G in homes requires a lot of small scale projects, distributed across a region. But putting V2G in a fleet location lets you access a lot of batteries in one big project, and lets you aggregate those batteries more easily.

So that’s exactly what Tellus Power, a charging equipment manufacturer in Irvine, CA, is doing. We took a tour of its facility and met with CEO Mike Calise and CTO Srikanth Kanaparthi.

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