One story stuck in my mind when I read ReThinkX’s predictions of the future. It was about how the people who made and operated horse drawn carriages in the US did not – at least at first – think that Henry Ford’s Model T was any threat. It was a bit of a curiosity, really, but it would never catch on widely, they thought. And so of course, they weren’t prepared for all the disruptive changes that followed when Americans started buying and driving the cars that began rolling off the assembly line.

I thought about that story when I was reading about how people are starting to use their electric vehicles to power their homes, because that same evolutionary process has been happening all around us for much of the past decade. It is about much more than just how electric vehicles could provide backup power for a home. It is about how the electrical system is changing because of Vehicle to Grid technology – or V2G, as they refer to it.