Refrigerators went dark, driverless taxis clogged the streets, and 30% of the city was left in the dark all at once. As the grid ages, AI infrastructure skyrockets energy bills, and weather-related outages increase, people are becoming increasingly aware of the fragility of electrical power.

Fragile electrical power is everywhere; it’s just not easily seen from the hills of Silicon Valley. Heatwaves can cause a city to turn on its air conditioning all at once, causing brownouts, bad weather can take down an aging power line, and even the transition to renewable energy resources (which generate power as wind and solar wax and wane, rather than being fuel/demand dependent) can leave a population without power for hours on end. And it’s not just the lights that stop working; it’s the food in the fridge rotting, it’s medication spoiling, and it’s the CPAP machine not turning on when people need it to sleep.

Why Distributed Energy Resources Leave Renters Behind

What is the solution? In an ideal world, distributed energy resources (DERs), like batteries and rooftop solar, step up where the grid fails for renters. Solar can offset the cost of power drawn from the grid. At the same time, home battery systems can help stabilize power delivery, enabling people to live their lives uninterrupted by fluctuating grid demand. The reality? DERs are expensive and only work for a limited number of people who live in single-family homes.

The Chicken-and-Egg Problem of Rental Housing

So, what options do housing renters have? There’s an inherent tension between renters, who might want or need DERs to stabilize their power delivery and costs but cannot change their built environment, and the property owner who owns the built environment, but does not have any incentive to pay money for their renters to save money and have a more stable lived experience—a classic chicken-and-egg problem.

The Untapped Energy Potential of Electric Vehicles

This is where thinking of vehicles, and thus vehicle charging, joins the picture.

What are electric vehicles? From a first principles perspective, they are simply massive batteries on wheels. In fact, they are the single largest battery source that any individual will ever own in their lifetime. For scale, a single portable battery (e.g., Anker, Jackery) used for camping and emergency preparedness is typically in the order of 1 kWh. Electric vehicles usually have an average capacity of approximately 65 kWh, with some models reaching up to 246 kWh. That means that every electric vehicle owner is storing anywhere from 65 to 246 times the capacity of the average portable battery (or 6.5-24 times that of a Tesla Powerwall) in their garage every day. Vehicles contain so much power that they store more than four to five times as much energy as all currently deployed grid-scale storage solutions.

V2G Works for Homeowners—But Not for Renters

With vehicle-to-grid (V2G) and vehicle-to-home (V2H), there is now the ability to tap into this massive battery. Vehicles have suddenly become the most affordable battery system that a person will ever own. This is fantastic news for everyone who lives in single-family homes. Now with a bidirectional charger, people can connect solar and use their large battery not only to stabilize their house and lower their energy bill, but also to earn revenue through demand-response and other grid stability programs.

But what about renters? Renters comprise over one-third of the US population, and given the chicken-and-egg cycle mentioned earlier, are often left without an option. If the renters are fortunate enough to have charging stations in their complex, they are usually designed to serve the entire complex and optimize profits for the Charge Point Operator (CPO). Drive up, charge, then leave back to your spot before you’re charged an idle fee. This model makes sense if people are looking to optimize the number of electrons delivered to an endpoint, but it leaves much to be desired when planning for the future.
There is no path or incentive for all the deployed power to return to where it’s needed. Isolated, with no electrical connection between their apartment and vehicle, renters will simply be left in the dark, facing higher energy bills (no ability to arbitrage) and higher transportation costs (apartment charging can be more expensive than public and is only likely to increase). It’s easy to imagine looking out over a city in ten to fifteen years during a blackout and seeing all of the single-family homes and commercial buildings lit up in the evening, while being able to easily point out the areas with high-density housing, left in the dark because of chargepoint deployers’ optimization on the wrong parameter.

Building Charging for the World We’re Actually Living In

The scariest thing is that as a society, we’re already halfway there. Every single charging company that deploys in multi-family homes builds for a shortsighted vision of the future, one in which we neglect the massive impact of vehicle batteries on individuals, their buildings, and the grid—particularly for housing renters.

What is the alternative? Dedicated charging for renters. We need to build better systems that make dedicated charging more affordable, reliable, and feasible for those who need it the most. We need to build for the reality that vehicles dwell for 95% of their lifetime. We need to build for a changing world.

Stephan Luna Ng is the founder and CEO of Moon Five Technologies in Berkeley, California. Stephan formerly worked at Google via Skybox, Planet Labs, Amazon via Zoox, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He earned his degree in astrophysics from the University of California, Davis.

Moon Five Technologies offers dedicated charging-as-a-service to renters for $50/month. Built to deploy quickly without utility or breaker upgrades, Moon Five’s system, Horizon, lets renters use their apartment’s unused electrical capacity to power their car, save on their energy bill, and make money while they sleep.

Learn more at: https://www.moonfive.tech/