The secret to a better grid? Electric vehicles.

You can’t tell when you’re passing one on the highway, but an electric vehicle may well have a superpower. It charges , of course, but it might also be able to send energy back into it. For a growing number of EVs, this vehicle-to-grid technology, or V2G, creates a revenue stream for drivers, who utilities pay to tap into their batteries when demand on the grid spikes.  Utilities across the country are pursuing pilot projects for the tech, figuring out how to coordinate hundreds, thousands, and eventually millions of EVs. To that end, today a coalition of companies — Eversource, National Grid, EnergyHub, Sunrun, and the Mobility House — is launching an early test of the technology in Massachusetts so utility customers can give it a try. Lessons learned here and elsewhere could drive the technique into the mainstream, making the grid more reliable, and electricity cheaper, even if you don’t own an EV. “It’s great to have Massachusetts stepping into the lead here and doing this because these learnings are what’s going to allow this technology to scale,” said Chip Silverman, director of grid services at Sunrun, a solar and battery company. In the new system, participants hook into an existing program called ConnectedSolutions, which allows homes to run off their residential batteries, among other things. Then when there’s a “demand response” event, like during a heat wave, EV batteries can help the grid keep up. Participants are compensated for this, just like some homeowners who provide energy from their solar panels.  “It’s really kind of a small number of hours per year that you’re discharging the battery,” said Russell Vare, vice president of vehicle-grid integration at the Mobility House North America, a provider of charging infrastructure. “It’s not necessarily like a daily discharge. It’s just during those peak times the events are called.” Grist thanks its sponsors. To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist. Here's How Utilities like V2G because they’re dealing with escalating, overlapping challenges. For one, the demand for electricity is growing as more power-hungry data centers come online and people switch from internal combustion cars to EVs and from gas furnaces to heat pumps. At the same time, utilities are trying to ditch gas and coal in favor of renewables like wind and solar. These clean technologies, though, are intermittent, in that the wind isn’t always blowing and the sun isn’t always shining.