Ford Wants Utilities To Help Make Bidirectional EV Charging Stick

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Earlier this week, the Ford Motor Company dropped word that anyone with a home EV charger who buys its new Ford Fathom electric pickup truck will not have to shell out cash for an external, wall-mounted inverter for bidirectional charging. Ford is also slashing the cost of its home EV charging and power management equipment. That’s not all. The automaker is also on a mission to convince all 3,000 utilities in the US and Canada to help accelerate the uptake of bidirectional charging systems.

The Bidirectional Charging Difference

With bidirectional charging, EVs can do something that gasmobile can. They can feed electricity back into household wiring, transforming themselves into emergency backup generators without the noise, pollution, and fuel cost of gas or diesel generators.

EVs equipped with bidirectional charging can also provide ratepayers with more control over their utility bills. With a home EV charger in hand, ratepayers can recharge their batteries during off-peak periods to take advantage of off-peak discounts, and they can use those discounted kilowatts to power their home during peak periods when rates are higher.

Drivers can also recharge at off-site charging stations that offers discounted rates, and ferry those kilowatts back for use at home.

Bidirectional EV Charging And The Utility Factor

Either way, the home needs to be equipped with an inverter to convert the DC current of an EV battery into the AC current used in buildings.

Or not, as the case may be. As explained by Ford earlier this week, the forthcoming Fathom pickup will come with its own built-in inverter. By eliminating the expense of an external inverter, Ford aims to sweeten the EV affordability pot, and the company has tapped Fathom to showcase the strategy at an MSRP under $30,000.

The missing link is the availability of utility-sponsored incentive programs that reward ratepayers for participating in managed demand programs. That includes rooftop solar, home energy storage systems, and even hot water heaters, with EV batteries being the icing on the cake.

“The opportunity is significant for utilities. But there are more than 3,000 utilities across the U.S. and Canada with largely unique interconnection processes,” Ford notes, drawing attention to another bottleneck limiting rapid uptake.

The problem is that interconnection processes are typically designed around rooftop solar and stationary batteries. “Bidirectional EVs bring new considerations because they are vehicles first, not stationary equipment,” Ford emphasizes.

Rooftop solar and home batteries are commonplace, but bidirectional EV charging has yet to scale up. To help push things along, last summer Ford began strategizing on a scalable interconnection system with the leading utilities American Electric Power, BC Hydro, Consumers Energy, Exelon, and Pacific Gas and Electric Co.

The aim is to get a process in place before the Fathom starts production next year, with a focus on collaboration between utilities, regulators, and OEMs. Accounting for periodic changes in bidirectional technology is another goal

As described by Ford the working group has already settled on the idea that interconnection should be required only for EV drivers who plan to deploy bidirectional EV charging in concert with the grid. Drivers who only charge up, or who only use their battery for backup power as needed, would not need to go through the interconnection process.

One Built-In Inverter To Rule Them All

If you’re wondering why Ford is the only US automaker to offer bi-directional EV charging with a built-in inverter, that’s a good question. One answer is Auto Motive Power, the California-based power management specialist that Ford acquired in November of 2023.

“As part of the deal, Ford is acquiring AMP’s technology, its team of nearly 150 employees, as well as the company’s facility in Santa Fe Springs, California,” Wards Auto reported in November of 2023.

“Ford and AMP determined the advantage of their technology is best realized with deep integration into Ford’s EV products, which will allow for optimizing both cost and performance while improving experiences for our EV customers,” Ford elaborated in an email message.

You can say that again. As described by Ward’s, AMP had three systems in hand leading to the Ford acquisition. One is a Tesla NACS-compliant onboard charger that supports bi-directional charging through integrated DC fast charge contactors. “It can also be used to tap into an EV’s reserve battery power when the vehicle is not in use,” Ward’s observed.

Another system involves a V-to-X (vehicle-to-everything) power management system that supports grid connections. Rounding out the three is “ampEMU,” an energy management tool that integrates an onboard charger and power distribution system, along with fast charging for up to 500 amps.

What Happens In Tesla, Doesn’t Stay In Tesla

By the time of the 2023 acquisition by Ford, AMP was already on its way to carving out an A-list slice of the bidirectional EV charging market. In 2020 the startup announced four new members on its advisory board, including former battery expert Kurt Keltey, who served an 11-year stint in strategic positions at Tesla before moving on to become VP of Automotive at Sila Nanotechnologies.

Sila CEO and co-founder Gene Berdichevsky also joined the AMP advisory board in 2020 along with former Canoo exec Phil Weicker and another Tesla alumnus, Troy Nergaard.

Ford is playing its AMP technology close to the vest, but a poster with the “ampforenergy” handle on the SpeakEV forum in August of 2023 provided some details about the EMU unit:

“The ampEMU is a comprehensive energy management system that manages the complete energy supply chain in an electric vehicle, from the vehicle’s charging infrastructure to battery management. It is backed by ampLOGIC for automotive big data analytics preventing battery degradation and enabling optimizations. ampEMU is compliant with the CCS, Tesla NACS, and CHAdeMO.”

“AMP’s EMU utilizes the latest SiC technology from Wolfspeed to drastically reduce the power electronics packaging volume,” ampedforenergy continued.

“This extremely compact unit will save space and reduce the vehicle’s overall weight, thereby improving range. EMU has the entire AMP Ecosystem in one unit offering cloud connectivity (ampLOGIC), battery management, power distribution unit, and charging solutions highly integrated with each other,” the poster added.

Speaking of Tesla, what happens next will be interesting. Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s pet project, the Cybertruck, was marketed as a pickup truck and it flopped epically, leaving the pickup truck field wide open for other EV makers to take a crack.

Meanwhile, last year Ford suspended its Lightning F-150 full sized electric pickup truck, evidently to focus its marketing program on the mid-sized Fathom, which is entering the market at a more affordable MSRP starting at $28,350.

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Image: Ford Fathom electric pickup truck in camouflage  (cropped; courtesy of Ford via CleanTechnica archive).