Bidirectional charging
Bidirectional charging, explained for the people who own the property.
A bidirectional charger moves power both ways: into a parked EV, boat or RV battery, and back out again to your building or the grid. That single change turns charging from a load you pay for into capacity you can use, sell and rely on in an outage.
Three modes
Where the power goes decides everything else.
V2G — vehicle to grid
Power crosses the meter back to the utility. Needs bidirectional charging equipment, site controls and an interconnection agreement. This is the mode that earns programme revenue.
V2H — vehicle to home or building
Power stays behind the meter to run a dock office, camp store, bathhouse or condo lobby. Needs an approved inverter and transfer switch, and it is the resilience case during outages.
V2L — vehicle to load
A socket that runs tools and appliances directly from the vehicle. No site equipment and no approvals — a guest convenience rather than an asset.
How it works
Four parts make a charger bidirectional.
The inverter path
A standard charger only rectifies AC into the battery. Bidirectional equipment adds a grid-synchronised inverter path — in the charger for DC bidirectional systems, or on board for AC bidirectional vehicles — so stored DC can be converted back to usable AC.
The controller
Software decides when to charge, hold or export, using tariff windows, the property's live load, reserve requirements and utility signals. Site load and guest reserve are always served before anything is exported.
The metering
Submetering at each pedestal makes charging billable and exports settleable, and produces the utilisation data that tells you where to expand next.
The certification
Bidirectional charging equipment certified to UL 9741, with grid-interactive inverter behaviour to UL 1741 SB where the utility requires it, plus enclosure ratings suited to salt air and wet sites.
What it pays
The value stacks — no single line carries the project.
Peak shaving
Cuts the demand charge that sets most of a commercial power bill, without depending on any programme being open.
Export revenue
Aggregated in phased, right-sized blocks, parked capacity reads as a dispatchable grid asset a utility can pay for.
Resilience
Critical loads island through an outage from stored capacity, with no generator to fuel or truck in.
Deferred upgrades
Storage buffers peaks, which frequently avoids a transformer or main-service upgrade when charging is added.
Owner FAQs
The questions that come up on every first call.
- What's the difference between bidirectional charging and V2G?
- Bidirectional charging is the capability — power can flow both ways. V2G is one use of it, where the power goes back across the meter to the utility. V2H and V2L are the other two uses, keeping power behind the meter or in a socket.
- Does every EV support it?
- No. Many vehicles offer V2L, fewer support V2H through one specific approved hardware package, and fewer still export to the grid. Capability varies by model year, trim and market, so confirm the exact vehicle with the manufacturer before specifying equipment around it.
- Does exporting wear out the battery?
- Cycling does age a battery, and manufacturers differ on how bidirectional discharge is treated under warranty. Well-designed programmes cap depth of discharge, keep state of charge in a conservative band and guarantee a departure-time charge level. Site-owned stationary storage carries none of that ambiguity, which is why we use it to do the heavy lifting.
- Do we need permission from the utility?
- For V2G, yes — exporting across the meter requires an interconnection agreement, and that review is usually the longest item in the schedule. V2H behind the meter needs electrical permits and inspection but not an export agreement.
- Can we install it without a service upgrade?
- Usually. Pairing chargers with on-site storage means the batteries absorb the peaks instead of the transformer. The feasibility review confirms it against twelve months of your billing data and the panel headroom on the loops you want to serve.
- What connectors should we install?
- CCS and NACS cover current vehicles, CHAdeMO matters where legacy V2G platforms are in scope, and marine or RV pedestal standards apply on the site side. We specify the mix per property rather than defaulting to one.
- How long does a deployment take?
- Construction is rarely the constraint. Interconnection review and permitting set the timeline, so your tailored plan includes a location-specific checklist showing the sequence and the long-lead items.
Get started
Find out what V2G is worth at your property
Marinas, boat yards, and campgrounds: take the 2-minute eligibility quiz and get a tailored V2G plan with equipment, revenue, and interconnection steps.
No GridLynQ block is energized yet. Every figure shown is a modelled profile of a candidate site's conditions — speculative, not measured, and not a quote or a guarantee of results.