GM announces lease program for powering your home with your EV
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GM Energy plans to offer a leasing program for its home energy management system to make it easier for EV owners to power their house with their car.
Why it matters: Having a reliable source of backup power when the grid is down sounds appealing — but it requires thousands of dollars in extra hardware to enable that two-way flow of energy from the car to the home.
- With its monthly lease program, the GM subsidiary is taking a page out of the car business to try to make that equipment purchase more affordable.
- Popular high-end home battery systems store about 13.5 kilowatt-hours, but many EVs carry considerably more stored energy.
How it works: GM sold more than 246,000 EVs with bidirectional charging capability in 2025. But they don't automatically send power to the home.
Other equipment is needed — and the price adds up, even with these current discounts on the GM Energy website:
- PowerShift bidirectional charger ($1,999)
- An enabler kit that includes power inverter to convert DC energy from the vehicle to AC energy for the home ($6,299)
- Bundled together, the entire vehicle-to-home (V2H) system is $8,098, a $200 savings.
- That's for the hardware only. Installation can cost thousands more.
Plus, there's a PowerBank energy storage system that lets homeowners capture and store power from the grid or solar panels for later use.
- Bundled with the V2H charging system, that'll cost homeowners between $15,297 and $26,997, depending on the size of the storage system.
What they're saying: Instead of paying upfront, the monthly lease model will make it easier for homeowners to opt in, Wade Sheffer, vice president of GM Energy, tells Axios.
- It could also encourage more people to buy electric vehicles.
- "What our intent is, always, from a GM and a GM Energy perspective, is to ensure that we're focusing on affordability by lowering the total cost of ownership for that customer," Sheffer said.
Yes, but: Crucially, GM can't say what the monthly lease payment will be.
- A lot depends on the individual home's electrical setup, as well as what incentives are available from local utilities.
- GM says more details will come later this year.
The big picture: About 14 of the roughly 70 EV models available in the U.S. offering bidirectional charging, and about 630,000 of them are on the road, according to Bloomberg.
