GM Will Take On Tesla with Ultium Home Energy System

• General Motors plans to offer ecosystem of home and business energy management products and services, dubbed Ultium Home and Ultium Commercial.

• GM will offer systems for home energy storage for bi-directional charging, vehicle-to-home (V2H) and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) charging, in addition to solar panels through partner SunPower.

• The automaker plans to roll out a home energy management system with the debut of the 2024 Chevrolet Silverado EV next year.

You may know Ultium as the name of GM's electric platform that underpins a number of vehicles by now, as well as the name of its new battery pack. But it will be much more than that soon, under a business unit dubbed GM Energy.

The automaker revealed it will offer Ultium Home and Ultium Commercial as part of a whole ecosystem of energy management products and services, along with Ultium Charge 360. The first such energy management products, similar in scope to Tesla's Powerwall, will arrive with the Chevrolet Silverado EV pickup next year, with this ecosystem promising bi-directional charging, vehicle-to-home (V2H) and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) charging, as well as microgrid solutions, home energy storage, solar power hardware, and even hydrogen fuel cells, to name a few.

Perhaps the most tangible piece of hardware for EV buyers as part of Ultium Home will be a bi-directional charger as part of a home energy system that GM plans to develop along with SunPower. Such a system will include home energy storage and solar panels, with SunPower slated to become GM's preferred installer for home energy systems under this plan, able to power homes during peak rate times or during a blackout. This home energy system is set to debut next year.

GM’s Energy Services Cloud will be the central interface for these systems, designed to connect customers with residential energy assets via its software applications. The Energy Services Cloud will also be offered to businesses for managing their fleets as well.

"GM Energy’s mission is to offer customers access to a full suite of energy products and services, including solutions beyond the vehicle, accelerating the seamless transition to an all-electric future," said Travis Hester, vice president of GM EV Growth Operations.

If it sounds like GM Energy will eventually offer both the software and the hardware for this new age of home energy storage and V2H capability, that is essentially correct.

The automaker says it will provide EV owners with a home energy system composed of integrated EV and battery solutions along with SunPower, and that it will also create a cloud interface for controlling all this hardware with software applications. So managing this fairly complex system, or automating it, should be an easily accomplished task in the coming years, for those EV owners who may wish to take advantage of their vehicles' batteries in this fashion.

"The massive scale of GM Energy’s solutions will allow us to better address current challenges with grid infrastructure, energy storage and energy management head on," said Mark Bole, vice president and head of V2X Battery Solutions at GM.

The prices for the different types of hardware haven't been announced yet, but there is still quite a bit a time until the market arrival of the Silverado EV.