GM Created a New Energy Business To Sell Batteries, Solar Panels

General Motors is creating a new energy business to sell batteries, charging equipment, solar panels, and software to residential and commercial customers in a broad-based effort to create a range of accessories that can help sell its lineup of electric vehicles. The Verge reports: The new division, GM Energy, is also a direct shot at Tesla as a major player in renewable energy generation and storage. GM has said it intends to eventually overtake Elon Musk's company in vehicles sales -- and now it wants to challenge it on the energy front as well. Travis Hester, GM's chief EV officer, said the company is making a serious grab for a piece of what is potentially a $120-150 billion market for energy generation and storage products. The aim is to make GM's brand synonymous with not just electric vehicles, but a whole host of products and services in orbit around EVs and their rechargeable lithium-ion batteries.

GM Energy will be comprised of three units: Ultium Home, Ultium Commercial, and Ultium Charge 360, which is the company's EV charging program. The division will sell a range of products to residential and commercial customers, including bi-directional charging equipment, vehicle-to- home (V2H) and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) equipment, stationary storage, solar products, software applications, cloud management tools, microgrid solutions, and hydrogen fuel cells. GM Energy will also be in the virtual power plant business. Many EVs with high-capacity batteries are being marketed for their ability to serve as backup power in the event of a blackout. (Hester notes that the Chevy Silverado EV, with its 200kWh battery pack, can power an average sized home for 21 days.) EVs can also feed power back into the grid during times of peak demand. GM Energy will be the entity that sells that power back to the utilities during times of high-energy consumption.

For solar energy, GM is teaming up with San Jose-based SunPower to sell solar panels and home energy storage products to residential customers. SunPower and other partners will supply the solar panels and perform the installations, with GM developing the complimentary software. Over time, as GM's battery factories come online and production of its Ultium-branded battery systems ramps up, the company intends on swapping in its own battery cells and storage units, Hester said. The automaker is also planning on manufacturing its own line of backup power generators using its Hydrotec-branded hydrogen fuel cells. (Ultium is the name of GM's electric vehicle battery and powertrain technology. Last year, the company said the Ultium Charge 360 network would be the name given to GM's own vehicle apps and software with a variety of third-party charging services, such as Blink, ChargePoint, EVgo, Flo, Greenlots, and SemaConnect.) "But much like its approach to EVs, the dates for the launch of these new products are still a ways off in the future," adds The Verge. "GM is still testing its V2H service in partnership with PG&E with a small sample of residential customers in California, and plans on expanding it to more homes in early 2023. And its solar products won't be available until 2024."

So it's copying Tesla?

[thesjaakspoiler]

How original...
But you need a crazy CEO to become as succesfull as Tesla, not some self-indulgent board room tiger who could care less whether he was selling cars or daipers as long as he gets paid millions in bonusses and fly with a private jet all around the country.

Re:So it's copying Tesla?

[Kernel Kurtz]

you need a crazy CEO to become as succesfull as Tesla, not some self-indulgent board room tiger who could care less whether he was selling cars or daipers

Well to be fair at least they did not make a counteroffer for Twitter.

Re:

[Agripa]

Everything Elon Musk has accomplished can be undone by Congress; all it takes is better lobbying.

Lifeboat

[mspohr]

Now that their ICE car business is doomed and they don't seem to be able to make EVs, it looks like they are abandoning the car business and trying to branch out to solar and batteries. Of course, they know nothing about making or selling solar and batteries so that will be a failure, too.

Re:

[NoorElahi1776]

Naw they'll just spin it off as Old-New GM after the next bailout like they did with GMAC at the start of the great recession, and New-New GM can go on flush with taxpayer dollars like nothing ever happened.

Re:

[jfdavis668]

ICE, ICE Baby

Re:

[Arethan]

Or just build EV kit cars, and open source the full design docs so that clones are cheap and easy to find.

Re:

[MIPSPro]

I looked into this. It's hard. Check out Electric GT [electricgt.com] for example. One can do it, but it's a huge hassle, takes a lot of skills to do right, and at the moment is expensive if you want to complete with the features and capabilities of a commercial EV. Wouldn't it be nice if you could just go buy an EV that you knew you'd be able to battery swap in 10 years?

Re: Give me battery choice and I'll love you forev

[flyingfsck]

Two years ago I wanted to buy an EV, but the waiting list was about two years, so I bought two ICEs instead. Im not too disappointed.

Going green

[The Evil Atheist]

It's as if it actually creates jobs and economic activity, instead of letting people rest on their laurels.

Re:

[ddtmm]

I would say definitely say 10-15 days at least. In a pinch, knowing the grid was out, you could stretch it to 20.

Re:

[Firethorn]

I'm at around 1k kW with electric everything, but no/limited AC.

Call it 30 kWh/day, around 6.5 days of capacity.

Amish might make it last for a month. What might last 20 days would be a small home that is gas appliance for everything heat related - gas furnace, gas water heater, gas stove, gas dryer, etc... And no AC, of course.

Re:

[iikkakeranen]

It does say "average sized home"... This is vague enough - there probably are some "average-sized" houses/apartments that are built energy-efficient enough for this to be true. But that'd be an exception. For an actual average household that battery would last about a week.

Good luck with that dude

[AlanObject]

GM has said it intends to eventually overtake Elon Musk's company in vehicles sales -- and now it wants to challenge it on the energy front as well. Travis Hester, GM's chief EV officer, said the company is making a serious grab for a piece of what is potentially a $120-150 billion market for energy generation and storage products.

Without Elon Musk and Tesla out there eating your lunch, breakfast, dinner and snacks those guys wouldn't have a clue of what to do. They would still be issuing statements about the EV/1 project showed that EVs were a great idea that nobody knew how to build because the technology just wasn't there yet. In the meantime: Hey look at our new Suburban this year we got more USB ports in it!

So far they have done a few things right -- they can make a decent car body and upholstery at least. But in order to get the range they figure they need to be marketable it looks like the only things they know how to do is 1) stuff more and more batteries in it and 2) throw lots of money out there and pray for better battery technology to come out of it.

In the meantime Tesla keeps finding ways to cut costs relentlessly and engineers for efficiency such they can get decent range and recharging rates with batteries they can build with today. At half the weight and cost.

GM should be able to do it, but it will take a seismic shift in their corporate culture to do so. If they don't give Travis Hester the same level of insane autonomy that Musk had, I don't think the odds are with them.

Stupid that they went with Sunpower

[WindBourne]

Sunpower spun off solar production so they have NO CONTROL over their future. They are just another middle man.