Electric Frog Company, a climate-tech startup, recently announced that it has provided free use of a Nissan LEAF electric vehicle (EV) to the Burrillville Wastewater Treatment Facility in Rhode Island, in a first use of a customer vehicle to support the New England electric grid.

When not in use by Burrillville employees, the EV is plugged into a state-of-the-art Fermata Energy bidirectional charger and monitored by energy management software to transfer power back to the grid on 24-hour notice to help meet peak demand.

“This is a unique effort to use an EV to help supply grid power on call,” says John Isberg, vice president of Customer Sales and Solutions at National Grid. “We welcome this significant step toward a smarter, cleaner and more reliable electric grid of the future.” 

National Grid, which serves large parts of New England and New York, offers an incentive in Rhode Island and Massachusetts for customer batteries under its Connected Solutions program. The incentive amount is based on the amount of power delivered to the grid during times of peak demand on hot summer afternoons.

“My team is excited to try out the electric car and I am pleased to be part of this innovative pilot,” says Michael Emond, superintendent of the Burrillville Wastewater Treatment Facility.

“This is the future,” says Brent Alderfer, founder and CEO of the Electric Frog Company. “It is very exciting to be able to offer an economic electric vehicle to the customer and electric grid reliability to the utility. This is the long-promised ‘vehicle to grid’ advantage at work for the consumer and the environment."

Founder and CEO of Fermata Energy David Slutzky says the partnership will make EVs affordable for all drivers. “We are confident that we will accelerate the adoption of EVs along with the transition to renewable energy on the grid,” he says. “We are excited to see our V2X operations at work in Burrillville.”

To allow charging of the electric vehicle for ordinary use and discharge power back to the utility grid on demand, Electric Frog partnered with vehicle-to-grid market leader Fermata Energy to install its bidirectional charger and proprietary vehicle-to-everything software to manage charging of the EV at the Burrillville facility and deliver power on call to the utility.