Sponsors
The bill accelerates deployment of bidirectional charging—improving household and grid resilience and aiding renewable integration—but does so at the cost of near-term public and private compliance and infrastructure expenses, potential higher vehicle and electricity prices, and uneven burdens on small manufacturers and resource-poor communities.
Homeowners and EV owners will be able to use their vehicles to provide backup power to homes or to export energy to the grid during outages, improving household resilience and reducing outage impacts.
Utilities, grid operators, and communities will gain greater grid flexibility and support for renewable integration because bidirectional charging enables EVs to act as distributed storage resources.
Consumers, fleet operators, and manufacturers will benefit from standardized technical rules and a coordinated federal roadmap that reduce compatibility issues and make deployment and interconnection of bidirectional charging easier.
Electric ratepayers and taxpayers could face higher utility and public-sector costs if the roadmap or standards push rapid infrastructure investments, potentially increasing electricity rates or diverting mitigation funds.
Automakers and vehicle buyers may face higher manufacturing and compliance costs, which could raise vehicle prices, reduce model availability, cause production delays, and disproportionately threaten small EV manufacturers (including exposure to large per-vehicle and aggregate penalties).
Preparing the federal roadmap and related DOE activities will incur federal costs and could lead to recommendations that prompt additional federal spending or subsidies paid for by taxpayers.
Based on analysis of 5 sections of legislative text.
Directs DOE to publish a roadmap and set standards, requires new EVs be bidirectionally capable by model year 2029, and requires FEMA hazard mitigation plans to include bidirectional charging.
Requires the Department of Energy to create a national roadmap and technical standards for two-way (bidirectional) electric vehicle charging, and directs DOE to require all new electric vehicles (including light-duty vehicles and school buses) sold beginning with model year 2029 to be capable of bidirectional charging. It also directs FEMA to require state and local hazard mitigation plans to incorporate bidirectional charging capabilities as a condition for certain federal mitigation funds, and sets civil penalties for manufacturers that violate DOE regulations.
Introduced November 19, 2025 by Julia Brownley · Last progress November 19, 2025