General Motors Launches New GM Energy Business Unit To Focus On EV Ecosystem Integration

Transportation requires much more than just vehicles, it requires an entire ecosystem that includes road infrastructure, fuel production and distribution, raw materials, recycling, traffic management and of course the vehicles. Successfully transitioning from our century old petroleum fueled ecosystem to one that runs on electrons will require more than just battery powered cars and trucks, we need to update the whole ecosystem. General Motors is adding a new business unit called GM Energy that aims to tackle more aspects of that ecosystem.

Automakers have traditionally only focused on vehicles, leaving pretty much everything else to companies that specialize in those areas. Apart from some early 20th century efforts at vertical integration by Ford, automakers generally stayed away from mining, farming, timber, steel and glassmaking and other material production. Automakers also didn’t drill for oil or refine gasoline. They didn’t build the roads (although GM is notorious for ripping out urban rail lines) or pipelines or run gas stations.

But all of that is changing. There is an urgency among most of the largest automakers to roll out more EVs and a recognition that many parts of the ecosystem aren’t evolving fast enough to properly support the volume of vehicles they plan to build or the customers they hope will buy those vehicles. GM has been forming partnerships with companies like Controlled Thermal Resources to extract lithium from the Salton Sea and Posco Chemical to process cathode materials for batteries. The automaker has also teamed up with EVGo to deploy thousands of additional fast chargers.

GM Energy is the next step in its efforts to support the entire EV ecosystem with energy and charging management systems, bidirectional charging and stationary storage. If some of this sounds familiar, it’s because GM isn’t the first to go down this path. For several years after Tesla started selling PowerWall home batteries and acquiring SolarCity, it was touted as an energy company. Ford Pro also offers cloud-based charging management for fleets as well as home power backup from an F-150 Lightning.

GM Energy will comprise three main segments, the previously announced Ultium Charge 360 platform that helps EV drivers find and pay for charging on the go, Ultium Home and Ultium Commercial. All of this is tied together with the GM Energy Services Cloud.

Starting with the new Chevrolet Silverado EV coming out next spring, new Ultium based EVs will offer bidirectional charging capabilities. Like the Lightning, GM EVs will be able to power a home when the power goes off when the home has a compatible wall charger and transfer switch to disconnect the home from the grid. But it will also be able to be controlled remotely. This is already being tested as part of a pilot project with California utility PG&E. If the load on the grid is approaching a peak that may require rolling blackouts, the utility can reach out to the homes of customers that have opted in and temporarily take them offline and power them from an EV that is plugged in.

GM will also be offering home battery systems based on its Ultium cells so even if a vehicle isn’t present or plugged in, the battery could power the house or during the day, if equipped with solar, the sun could handle it. GM Energy is partnering with SunPower to design solutions and enable these installations.

For commercial customers, GM Energy will also be offering larger scale stationary storage or fuel cell systems to provide backup power. Particularly important to fleet operators will be the Energy Services Cloud that will include charging management solutions. Like the offering from Ford Pro, this will allow fleet managers to track the state of charge of vehicles, when they need to go out and schedule which vehicles should be charged when to ensure readiness and minimize downtime.

Among other things, this will allow fleets to manage how much energy is being used when, to help avoid peak demand charges that significantly escalate commercial electric bills. Everything can be managed through a cloud services dashboard. GM is already working with a number of commercial partners including Con Edison, Graniterock mining and New Hampshire Electric Cooperative to test and develop these systems.

Initially the stationary storage systems will be built with cells from a number of providers. Longer term Ultium battery modules that no longer have the capacity for use in vehicles may be repurposed into some of these stationary systems. According to Travis Hester, vice president of EV growth operations at GM, commercial storage systems “will start off at 1 MW and then vary from there.” Details on the home storage will be released later, but they will likely be similar to current offerings from companies like Tesla and Generac with about 7 kW of power and 10-12 kWh of storage capacity each.

The goal of both the home and commercial solutions is to make charging more cost effective and convenient, as well as to contribute to the resiliency of the electrical grid. It’s generally considered that there is more than enough power generation capacity to support a fully electric fleet, but the distribution grid is currently lacking in reliability and capacity. Systems like what GM Energy and other companies are developing can help spread the load more evenly over the course of the day so that generation can be used more efficiently.

Integrated energy management systems for both residential and commercial users are going to be an essential part of enabling the electric vehicle ecosystem to work reliably and efficiently everywhere. We can likely expect to see other automakers pursue similar programs to make the transition as seamless as possible for customers. Ultium Commercial systems will likely be available when the Chevy Silverado EV work truck launches in the first half of 2023 while Home systems will come with the launch of the consumer Silverado in the fall.