As EV Load Grows, U.S. Utilities Leverage Managed Charging to Unlock Flexibility and Cut Costs

The United States currently has 7.2 million electric vehicles, a scale that both heightens the urgency of grid upgrades and provides power companies with a powerful tool to defer related expenditures.

U.S. power companies are partnering with third-party software vendors and automakers to develop and expand managed charging programs, spreading out EV charging loads to avoid peak stress on local systems, thereby helping to defer transmission and distribution infrastructure upgrades that drive up electricity prices.

Manufacturers including General Motors, Ford, and Rivian also see value in these programs and are partnering with distributed energy resource providers such as EnergyHub, WeaveGrid, and Chargescape to improve customer experience and expand program reach.

Despite federal policy changes in 2025 rolling back support for electric vehicles, sales have remained largely stable so far. According to S&P Global, battery-electric vehicles accounted for an estimated 5.2% of U.S. auto sales in March, continuing the segment's average of 5% since November 2025. Even before the U.S.-Israel war with Iran pushed up oil prices, EV load was expected to grow significantly in the coming years.

Managed charging—often called V1G, referring to one-way energy flow from the grid to the vehicle—has been used to shift load away from peak periods. But stakeholders told Utility Dive that fully realizing its reliability and cost-saving potential requires standardized data-sharing protocols, which have been a difficult hurdle for the industry.

"There is still work to be done," said Zach Woogen, executive director of the Vehicle-Grid Integration Council. But by strengthening "partnerships" among automakers, power companies, and aggregators, utilities can learn to use managed charging "to improve system reliability and address the affordability crisis," he said.

Seth Frader-Thompson, president of leading aggregator EnergyHub, holds a similar view. EnergyHub works with GM, Rivian, Toyota, and Tesla on managed charging programs. "Grid-aware managed charging ensures EVs become a resource for managing national load growth," he said.

From passive to active managed charging

"Managed charging (or smart charging) technology is quite mature; there are no technical barriers," said Dave McCreadie, Ford's director of EV-grid services. "Communication between utilities, automakers, aggregators, and their vehicles has been repeatedly validated in numerous utility programs and works well."

Beyond avoiding demand peaks through managed charging, EVs can also serve as bidirectional assets connected to the grid, not only storing electricity for driving but also providing backup power for homes (called V2H, vehicle-to-home), exporting energy to the distribution system (V2G, vehicle-to-grid), or supplying any other external system (V2X, vehicle-to-everything). But industry insiders say the first step is moving from passive to active managed charging.

According to the North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center's annual state EV policy review, in 2025, legislative or regulatory efforts in 32 states and Puerto Rico addressed improving access to residential managed charging. Many utilities already offer "passive" managed charging programs that use time-of-use rates to encourage customers to charge during off-peak hours, but still rely on customers to manage their own charging schedules.

As technology matures, utilities are increasingly turning to "active" managed charging, where customers delegate most charging control to the utility or service provider, which can adjust load in real time based on system conditions. According to the state EV policy review, regulators approved nine new active managed charging programs last year.

Experts say active managed charging can avoid some unintended consequences of passive programs. For example, in California, passive managed charging led to secondary peaks after midnight, when electricity rates drop.

Divesh Gupta, director of clean energy solutions at Baltimore Gas and Electric (BGE), said the company was among the first investor-owned utilities to offer time-of-use rates for battery-electric vehicles and subsequently launched an active V1G program. Active managed charging "significantly changed the load curve produced by BEV time-of-use rates," Gupta said. The results were so compelling that in 2023 regulators approved expanding the program from 6,900 participants to 30,000. He said future planning requires active management to avoid secondary and local peaks and ensure substation transformers are not overloaded.

Analyses by state regulators and others appear to support the use of managed charging—especially active managed charging—to control costs. The California Public Advocates Office reported in 2025 that EV charging management had a "significant" impact on costs for the state's three investor-owned utilities, and that "moving peak EV load off-peak at scale could save $5 billion to $18 billion in distribution costs by 2040."

The Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources calls EV load management a "no-regrets strategy" for reducing peak load, while emphasizing the need for active managed charging and V2X to "maximize benefits and minimize grid impacts." The department said: "Without active managed charging, off-peak price signals could cause large numbers of EVs to begin charging simultaneously, potentially overloading local distribution infrastructure."

A report prepared by the Brattle Group for the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority also reached similar conclusions about the value of active V1G programs.

"Utilities view the millions of EVs in their territories as flexible load that can be leveraged when data center demand stresses the system," said Joseph Vellone, CEO of Chargescape. Chargescape aggregates vehicles from Ford, BMW, Honda, Nissan, Tesla, Stellantis, and Rivian for more than a dozen U.S. utilities.

McCreadie said Ford will not abandon EVs due to federal policy changes. He said Ford plans to launch a series of affordable EVs starting in 2027.

Customer data sharing "has almost no consensus"

Although stakeholders agree on the benefits of active managed charging, scaling programs involving so many participants remains challenging. Utilities and EV manufacturers must agree on interoperability standards and communication protocols to safely share data, said Dan Bowermaster, senior regional manager of electric transportation at the Electric Power Research Institute. But automakers, charger manufacturers, aggregators, and utilities all "view customers as their own," so "there is almost no consensus on how to share customer data," he said.

WeaveGrid, the service provider for BGE's managed charging program, deploys software that directly interacts with vehicle telematics, utility telemetry, data communications, and system controls to help manage system peaks, said Mathias Bell, vice president of market development and partnerships at the company. "It also uses advanced scheduling and control to optimize EV charging across locations on the distribution system," he said. The goal is to increase system utilization, thereby putting downward pressure on customer electricity rates, Bell said.

EnergyHub, for its part, focuses on working directly with automakers, said Jeff Huron, its director of business development. "There is no better channel than automakers' customer apps and telematics to engage customers where they are and interact with their vehicles on a daily basis," he said.

Currently, automakers are still learning how to balance automating charging preferences for customers with communicating necessary information to them, said Ford's McCreadie. Companies will always protect the parts of the customer experience unique to their brands, but the basic communication structure and format need not be differentiated, he said. "Once the signal reaches the automaker's cloud, the automaker can choose how to communicate with its vehicles and chargers," he said.

Ford wants to establish "customer-friendly" active V1G programs in "every U.S. utility service territory" that fairly reward EV drivers, McCreadie said. "To do that, we need common technical and communication standards by 2030" and "seamless, fast, and simple ways for customers to enroll in these programs," he added.

Increased collaboration among utilities, aggregators, and vehicle manufacturers appears to be bearing fruit in some areas. Aseem Kapur, chief revenue officer at GM Energy, said best practices around enrollment processes and incentives are emerging in GM's partnerships with National Grid, Eversource, Duke Energy, and EnergyHub to explore active V1G. GM is committed to "standardized data flows" and "interoperable system designs" to reduce costs and support EV adoption, Kapur said. "Now is the time to collaborate across aggregation partnerships," because "if it's simple and easy for customers, it will drive unit cost improvements and mass adoption," he added.

Scale and flexibility

Active V1G programs "are no longer science experiments," and utilities and regulators are preparing to scale programs to deliver greater benefits, said Woogen of the Vehicle-Grid Integration Council. Despite federal policy changes, stakeholders remain focused on advancing policy at the state level, he said. Identifying best practices for interconnection rules, rate design, and funding for upfront incentives and other customer compensation programs is critical to scaling utility programs and attracting more customers, he added.

Some utilities are also changing their messaging, as customers resist handing over control of their vehicle charging. For example, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) calls active V1G "'optimized charging' so customers understand the utility is optimizing their EV load rather than managing it," said Joel Ulloa, the utility's vehicle-grid integration manager. With more than 6,000 customers already enrolled and a proposed expansion to 50,000 customers, "PG&E is committed to scaling," he added.

The utility released Part 2 of its Electrification Impact Study in January, concluding that many costs of EV charging load will occur at the distribution system level, Ulloa said. Active V1G "can serve new electrification load and defer or reduce distribution system upgrade costs that would otherwise be needed," he said. Although reduced federal EV policy support is not "favorable," optimized charging "can help clarify which tools will support market growth," and standardized control and communication protocols can make the customer-side hardware needed for full-scale deployment and utilization of active V1G flexibility cheaper and easier to interconnect, he said.

Perhaps the greatest value of active V1G to utilities lies in the flexibility it offers system operators, and that flexibility is continuously improving. The next one to two years will validate the ability to target specific equipment classes to meet specific utility needs, said EnergyHub's Huron. This will "allow dynamic load shaping based on distribution network value and real-time conditions," he said. "Faster response requires a fast, clear, and concise customer experience, as well as the system's ability to adjust as customer participation changes within the event window," Huron said. "Most automakers are planning to leverage their telematics and other technologies to offer these fast-response capabilities more broadly in the coming years."

"EV charging load has 'significant flexibility'," said Gisela Glandt, vice president of business development at virtual power plant manager Uplight. Active V1G programs "are growing, and their value proposition has not yet reached its full potential," she added. Lack of interoperability and siloed utility programs limit the potential, Glandt said. Active V1G needs to become part of a utility's demand-side resource portfolio—what Uplight calls the "demand stack"—so it can flexibly meet multiple system needs on demand, she said.

Correction: This article has been updated to correct the name of Joseph Vellone, CEO of Chargescape.