Trade Hounds CEO David Bauders sat down with Natalie Ormos, Head of Software Products for GM Energy, to explore how GM is building the future of energy beyond the vehicle.
In this Q&A, Natalie breaks down how software is powering a more connected energy landscape—linking electric vehicles, home energy systems, and the grid. From bidirectional charging and vehicle-to-grid capabilities to utility integrations and customer enrollment programs, GM Energy is working to make home resiliency and energy optimization more accessible.
Software is a key component because we want to create the best-in-class features for our customers. We always say within GM that we put the customer in the center of everything that we do. We want to have seamless experiences for our customers to be able to optimize their charging within the app.
We want to provide experiences where it's all in the center of your hand, for customers to lower the total cost of ownership as well. All of this is done within key integrations with partners where we rely on APIs, data, cloud integrations, and so forth. We take all that together and provide a very simplistic UI.
Our customers can just click a couple of buttons, enroll in these programs, and all of that then provides their cost savings, home resiliency, and other incentives.
Anyone who has a home and wants us to provide resiliency for their home. The pressure on the grid right now is so huge that there are so many power outages and blackouts. We want to keep the lights on. We want to make sure customers have Wi-Fi and so forth.
Our products, you can either tie it to your electric vehicle, or if you have our power bank or solar, you don't have to have our vehicle. You can have that standalone system. And our app provides all of that experience for you as well.
So, it could honestly be any customer who just wants to provide resiliency within their home.
Awareness is key to all of this. We do have competitors in the market, but we are a new entrant. This is another huge key component to our vision and our goals. We want to drive EV adoption—we want to provide our customers with charging their vehicle, being able to power your home, and eventually give back to the grid and get paid for that as well.
The software is actually pretty complex. And we're going to start testing some of it because we're partnering with multiple different utilities. Right now, we're learning about how we're taking things from them, interpreting that within our own GM Energy cloud, learning how it ties into the batteries of the vehicle, and how we can then compute all of that.
You just enroll in these programs, and we do everything for you. So the customer doesn't really need to know all of this. They just need to know that their vehicle will be powered, they are providing resiliency back to the grid, and at the end of the day, they get some cost savings from that.
For anyone who has an EV, our products will work with that. Anyone who has a home can buy our power bank.
Right now, it's a direct-to-consumer. We sell some things through the dealer, but our home energy products and our vehicle-to-home are sold through direct-to-consumer customer purchases. They enroll, commission their product, and manage everything in the palm of their hand with our mobile app.
We want it to keep everything all within one app. Whether you purchased our vehicle or didn't, you would download the same app. You can seamlessly add our product to it—if it's already commissioned, it just automatically shows.
You're able to manage charging, so you set how much you actually want to have your vehicle charge. You can add your utility program that you're already a part of. It could show you your rate-optimization plans. If there are off-peak hours or peak hours, you can toggle certain things on and off. So you're actually saving money that way.
If you have the whole vehicle-to-home bundle and there is a power outage, it automatically pops on within seconds, and all of your lights come on.
You're able to do load optimization within there, so you can set different parameters within the app that you want to manage. And then you see the consumption that's coming through. You can see how much battery is left within your actual vehicle and then how much output is coming through.
And the app does all of that in a very intuitive interface that we built out for our customers. Just a couple clicks, a couple toggles, and you can see everything in real time.
I think the biggest one is still the lack of awareness that GM is within this market. We have the largest fleet of electric vehicles. A lot of customers still don't realize that we even sell our own GM Energy chargers to provide support for that, and that these vehicles have this capability to power your home.
When I talk about it with friends and family, they're like, "How can that actually happen?” But it's cool technology that we're providing. How do we continue to build this momentum going into the future and with vehicle-to-grid? The awareness piece is going to be the biggest thing that I think we're going to be working on to make sure our customers realize that this exists.
Watch the full discussion between David Bauders and Natalie Ormos below: