Volteras wants to connect to more EVs than anyone else

For years, people have been worried — both rightly and otherwise — that electric vehicles could strain the grid to the breaking point. But as they spread, and as EV technology advances, some think these rolling battery packs could become a lifeline for the United States’ aging electrical system. “In the future, the electric vehicle will be the center of the entire energy grid,” Peter Wilson, co-founder and CEO of Volteras, told TechCrunch. The potential is there: Last year, the U.S. installed 37.1 gigawatt-hours of grid-scale energy storage. The country could increase that amount by nearly 10 times if every EV on the road today was hooked up to a charger that can feed electricity back into the grid. There are a few hurdles, of course. Many new EVs today don’t support vehicle-to-grid connections, though that’s changing, and there’s a lack of affordable bidirectional chargers. But Volteras has been making headway on the software side. Recently, the London-based startup closed a $11.1 ... Read full article.