Rivian and EnergyHub today announced a strategic partnership to embed utility-managed charging directly into Rivian vehicles across the country.
Under the partnership, Rivians will be available as controllable resources to more than 150 utilities on EnergyHub’s distributed energy resource management platform, giving system operators dispatchable flexibility during times of grid stress.
The move isn’t just about plugging the Rivian ecosystem into EnergyHub’s DERMS platform, but rather about unlocking near-term headroom on constrained local grids, said Jeff Huron, EnergyHub’s head of EV strategy, in an exclusive interview with Latitude Media. It’s reflective of a shift in how utilities understand the role EVs can play in a resilient grid, he added.
“The EV programs that we’ve seen in the past largely copy from traditional demand response programs [like] solving bulk system constraints, reducing peak load,” Huron explained. “We’ve found that that alone is not a great use case in a silo for EVs, because they’re different assets than thermostats and batteries.”
Where early EV programs largely copied thermostat demand response — calling a few peak events a year — direct integration with an OEM’s telematics lets EnergyHub run always‑on, feeder‑level load shaping while still guaranteeing drivers have the range they need by morning, Huron said.
Huron pointed to a recent report that EnergyHub commissioned from the Brattle Group, released in January, which found managed charging can increase system hosting capacity by as much as three times. By shifting EV loads dynamically, utilities can defer massive capital expenditures on substation upgrades and new transformers by up to a decade. In that sense, Huron said, the Rivian partnership is really about speed to power on a constrained grid.
The OEM era
Direct OEM integration is a key element of EnergyHub’s customer acquisition strategy in the wake of its acquisition of the EV telemetrics provider Bridge to Renewables last year, Huron explained. As part of that deal, EnergyHub absorbed BTR’s customer experience software, as well as the 12 EV manufacturers BTR was already managing in charging programs, bringing over 500,000 connected cars into EnergyHub’s ecosystem.
Without direct partnerships, acquisition is expensive and clunky, Huron explained. That’s partly because of data access problems: If aggregators rely on unofficial or unauthorized data feeds, they can’t be sure the information is accurate, and have no guarantee those feeds will persist over time. They also have to compete for attention, rather than reaching customers inside the OEM’s own app.
“It’s more expensive to market, more expensive to engage, and it’s more disjointed, so there’s risk there,” he said, adding that EnergyHub has several other direct OEM partnerships in the works for later this year.
For Rivian, its foray into smart charging kicked off via a partnership with WeaveGrid, announced last summer, which takes much the same approach as the EnergyHub one: focusing on helping drivers shift their charging to cheaper and cleaner times on the grid, giving utilities more visibility into how and when Rivians are charging, and turning those vehicles into grid resources that can be actively folded into virtual power plants — rather than just nudged toward off-peak charging.
Automakers have been partnering with energy and grid management companies to make charging greener and cheaper since the 2010s. BMW, for example, tapped a residential solar company to offer discounted rooftop panels to its drivers. Throughout the mid-late 2010s automakers like Tesla, Ford, and GM experimented with smart charging pilots that timed loads based on grid signals or solar output.
Now though, the conversation has shifted toward building the foundations of a scalable, distribution-aware managed charging ecosystem, despite the turbulence in the EV market.
Utilities are moving more cautiously on EVs amid that policy uncertainty, Huron acknowledged. “In 10 years, I think we’ll end up in the same place that we would have — there’s just going to be variability over the next few years,” he said. “Utilities have long-term horizons that they need to plan for, and so they’re not like ‘Okay, we don’t have to worry about EVs ever again.’”
OEMs, meanwhile, are doubling down on software and grid integration, and starting to see managed charging less as a standalone incentive program, and more as a core part of the EV ownership experience, Huron added. He pointed to Ford, which, despite headlines about pulling back from EVs, recently announced its Universal Electric Vehicle platform, a blueprint for building cheaper EVs modeled on Tesla’s approach to manufacturing.
A path to V2G?
The Rivian partnership doesn’t yet include vehicle-to-grid capabilities, Huron explained, but he sees it as part of the same trajectory. A lot of OEMs come to EnergyHub first wanting to talk about sending power back to the grid, he said, and only then realize how much groundwork has to be laid with data sharing and managed charging to make that happen.
“A lot of our engagements that have turned into our direct OEM partnerships have started with vehicle to grid,” he explained. Toyota, for example, approached EnergyHub about a V2G program, but once the company realized how much the process would entail, landed on managed charging as an interim step.
Some OEMs, by contrast, are trying to leapfrog straight to V2G, effectively pushing utilities and regulators to “meet the moment” now that most vehicles are technically capable of bidirectional power flows. EnergyHub is already running V2G pilots with commercial buses, and is preparing a residential pilot with DTE Energy and GM, which has 13 V2G-capable models.
“There’s increasingly technology that’s available from the automaker, and there’s some increasing program opportunities as well,” Huron said. To date, programs have once again been modeled on demand response setups for other assets, which Huron describes as the “low-hanging fruit approach to get into the residential space.”
But in 2026, he added, the industry will start to pilot other, more EV-specific structures, “and we’ll start to see what is the most compelling program model for an EV driver that’s using their vehicle for V2G.”
