V2L = Vehicle-to-Load (your EV can be used to power appliances or to charge other EV's, similar to how a portable gas generator works)
V2H = Vehicle-to-Home (your EV can be used as a "whole-house battery" to power a home or business)
V2G = Vehicle-to-Grid (your EV sends energy to support the grid, such as for off-peak hours, high grid load situations, or power outages)
Typically, EV's only ingest electricity, but thanks to modern technology, they can now output electricity (called "bi-directional charging") & act as an electric generator! For example, one of the features of V2L is V2V (Vehicle-to-vehicle) charging, so if you have an F-150 EV, you can charge up another EV, such as a Mach-E. You're basically siphoning your own battery into another electric vehicle, which is pretty cool for emergency situations:
They even did one experiment where they charged up five cars at once from an F-150 EV!
The Ford F-150 Lightning Can Charge Five Cars At Once
It's all thanks to Ford's innovative Pro Power Onboard system.
www.thedrive.com
When would you really use V2V charging? Probably almost never lol. But is IS a risk due to battery capacity issues! Electric vehicles suffer from a multitude of issues:
1. Range limitations due to physical battery capacity limitations (iirc the max range is Lucid Air's 512-mile battery, which has a base price of a whopping $140k)
2. Real-world estimate reductions (due to things like driving at highway speeds, using the HVAC system, etc.)
3. Charging-speed hassles (even the 15-minute "quick charge" features on modern electric cars are a REALLY long time when you're busy, tired, or have kids in the car)
4. Active lying on the manufacturer's part (see link below)
5. Phantom or "vampire" power loss (excessive standby power drain has been particularly noted by Rivian owners)
For example, Tesla has been accused of intentional inflation of in-dash range-meter projections, as well as corporate-sponsored diversions of service calls for those issues:
Tesla’s secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints
About a decade ago, Tesla rigged the dashboard readouts in its electric cars to provide “rosy” projections of how far owners can drive before needing to recharge, a source told Reuters.
www.reuters.com
AAA now has mobile electric charging for people who run out of juice on the road or in parking lots: (for example, a lot of people who park their cars at airport parking lots for trips will come back to a dead EV due to vampire power loss)
V2L also features standard 120V outlets. The F-150 lightning EV has three 120V locations: (there's also an available 240V outlet in the bed on the 9.6kW model)
1. Frunk
2. Cab
3. Bed
Which is pretty cool for on-site construction projects:
The bed has four 2.4kW AC power outlets for a total of up to 9.6kW of power:
Which lets you go camping or tailgating in a fancy way!
Munro goes to town on the Lighting's neato system:
There is a growing list of EV's that come standard with V2L capabilities:
Vehicle-to-load Explained - V2L for off-grid or backup power — Clean Energy Reviews
In this article, we explain how vehicle-to-load or V2L technology works and how it can be connected to an off-grid system to reduce the dependence on backup generators and for storing excess solar energy. Plus how to use V2L as a backup power system at home.
www.cleanenergyreviews.info
The story starts to get more fun when you add in Bidirectional Inverter-Chargers:
And for on-grid & off-grid applications:
V2H lets you use your EV as an emergency home generator by using bi-directional charging to power your house. Note that the F-150 starts at $50k & a whole-home gas generator goes for around $10k to $25k installed. That way you can use your electric chainsaw to clear out your fallen tree limbs in the middle of the night with the lights on!
Just look how smug you can be when the power goes out! Note that only the F-150 Lightnig Pro starts at $50k; the actual base price for the 240-mile standard-range battery consumer model has a base $55k & upgrading to the 320-mile extended-range battery immediately jumps the price up to $70k, with the fully-loaded Platinum model coming in at over $90k:
But seriously, that is a pretty cool feature:
V2G isn't really a thing yet afaik. The basic idea is that consumers can feed power back from their EV to the grid to get paid, to handle things like high loads (ex. Texas A/C power draws in the summer heat), and for area power outages. They can pull from things like:
1. Residential solar panels
2. Stationary home batteries (ex. Tesla Powerwalls)
3. Bi-direction V2G-enabled electric cars that are plugged in (you can set a buffer so that your vehicle doesn't get so drained you can't drive it anywhere)
Tesla will be adding V2G to their cars in 2025 (supposedly...you know Elon's timeline lol), but they also want to sell Powerwalls, so they're kind of dragging their feet on it haha. I mean, using your car as a house battery is kind of an expensive, first-world perk, but at the same time, given how rare it is for the power to go out, it IS nice to be able to plug your EV that you already have in to power your house for a day or two, rather than spending tens of thousands of dollars on a whole-house generator! Although I have a simple gas generator & it was only a few hundred bucks from Home Depot & does fine for the once or twice a year my power goes out lol. A nice future would be:
1. All EV's have bidirectional charging (power appliances, charge up other vehicles, power your house, feed the grid as needed)
2. All homes have Powerwall-style battery systems & solar panel systems for hyper-local power redundancy for residential applications & for backfeeding to the the area's grid for as-needed support
3. All EV's adopt Tesla's Supercharging standard (there are more than 12,000 Tesla Superchargers in the United States & Canada and more than 45,000 worldwide, and more & more manufacturers are coming to terms with Tesla to integrate Supercharging into their vehicles, including Ford), so that we just have a single, high-speed standard for everyone to use
Is all of this stuff practical? I mean...kinda! It's certainly neat to have! It would be really fun to have electric charging available on camping trips, although like the F-150's max range is only 320 miles, so unless you have a charger nearby, it'd be a bit scary to run out of juice in the middle of the woods because you wanted to watch Netflix on your camping TV lol. I've also seen the onboard chargers used to charge things like electric bikes, which is a pretty good use case. So for now, these V2L/V2V/V2H/V2G features are kind of "nice to have". Although prices ARE starting to come down, with some EV's dipping below the $30k price point these days, so I think it will get a little more practical as time goes on!