America’s grid is reeling. General Motors offers itself as a distributed utility in disguise

As AI data centers strain the grid, GM wants to turn its EVs and batteries into a solution. Ford has a simpler plan—and the two Detroit rivals are betting on very different futures.

America’s electric grid is buckling under extreme weather, aging infrastructure, and an AI build-out that is quietly rewriting U.S. power demand—and General Motors wants to turn that crisis into a business.

At a San Francisco event Tuesday called GM Empower, the automaker is pitching itself not just as an EV seller but a de facto distributed utility, stitching together hundreds of thousands of battery-powered cars, new grid-scale storage, and a unified charging platform into what amounts to a virtual fleet of power plants. The bet puts GM on a collision course with Ford’s newly branded Ford Energy unit as both Detroit rivals race to repurpose underused EV capacity for a more urgent problem: keeping the lights on in the AI era. 

GM’s case rests on three planks.

A quarter-million cars as power plants

The first is its existing fleet. GM says more than 250,000 of its EVs on U.S. roads can already charge bidirectionally—pulling electricity from the grid and sending it back.

“Every evening, a quiet transformation occurs across the American landscape,” GM Energy vice president Wade Sheffer writes in an open letter to utilities and regulators, describing the EVs sitting in driveways as “a massive opportunity to aggregate energy storage capacity.”

A firmware update is rolling out to customers with GM Energy’s vehicle-to-home hardware, converting those systems into full vehicle-to-grid assets with no new hardware and turning home backup systems into grid resources when utilities need them. 

GM is piloting the idea in Michigan with DTE Energy at 30 employee homes, and has sketched a 2030 vision with Pacific Gas & Electric in which more than 52,000 GM EVs help balance the grid out of a projected 130,000 vehicles in the area. 

Betting on batteries as data centers surge

The second plank is stationary storage—just as AI data centers become the grid’s hungriest customers.

In a January 2026 report, the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) warned that U.S. electricity demand is surging faster than the grid can adapt, with summer peak load alone projected to rise by about 224 gigawatts over the next decade—nearly 70% higher than last year’s forecast—even as new capacity lags. More than half of the regions NERC studied could face resource-adequacy problems in that window, a worsening outlook that the group partly attributes to data centers. 

GM is developing sodium-ion batteries with Peak Energy, arguing the chemistry’s lower cost, abundant materials, and wide temperature tolerance suit substations and data centers better than the lithium formulas optimized for cars. 

“In grid-scale stationary storage systems, if we can make the cell safer and more robust, we can remove complexity elsewhere in the system,” writes Kurt Kelty, GM vice president for battery and sustainability. 

It is also using its Ultium Cells joint venture to make LFP storage cells and working with Redwood Materials to put thousands of second-life EV packs into microgrids—including a 7.2 MWh system at a Michigan plant GM says could save more than $3 million in power over its lifetime. The message: GM isn’t just selling cars into a stressed grid; it’s supplying the batteries to stabilize it. 

One app for every charger

Third is software. On Tuesday, GM is launching Energy Pass, a single interface inside its myChevrolet, myCadillac, and myGMC apps that lets drivers find, start, and pay for charging across Tesla’s Supercharger network, Electrify America, and IONNA, with EVgo and ChargePoint to follow. GM says those five networks cover nearly 70% of accessible U.S. DC fast chargers. 

After a one-time enrollment, drivers can check live charger status, review history, and—at compatible stations—let “Plug & Charge” handle authentication and billing automatically.  The same app is meant to become the front door to GM’s broader energy ambitions: managing home backup, scheduling charging, and eventually enrolling cars in utility programs that pay drivers for supporting the grid. 

Ford’s different bet

Ford is telling a different story. After EV demand fell short, and battery plants sat underused, it carved out Ford Energy, a wholly owned subsidiary more interested in selling batteries to the grid than turning pickups into power plants. 

Ford is repurposing Michigan and Kentucky factories to build lithium iron phosphate “DC Block” storage systems for utilities, data centers, and industry, targeting at least 20 GWh of annual capacity. It has signed a five-year framework deal with EDF’s North American power arm for up to 20 GWh of grid-scale systems, with deliveries beginning in 2028. Executives have signaled that the shift is partly aimed at salvaging capital committed during the EV boom while tapping new utility and data center demand. 

Where GM talks about orchestrating millions of batteries on both sides of the meter—from sodium-ion containers at substations to Escalade IQs in driveways—Ford is taking a more traditional industrial approach as a made-in-America supplier of standard battery blocks. Both see data centers, renewables, and grid resilience as growth markets, and both are racing to sign their first big contracts. 

GM chief product officer Sterling Anderson argued at GM Empower that “the real bottleneck is energy,” while describing a future where “electric vehicles, the batteries that power them, and the country’s power grids work together.”

The hard part is regulatory

GM’s more radical vision is political, not technical. In an open letter to utilities and regulators, GM Energy calls its bidirectionally capable EVs a “massive, distributed power asset waiting to be integrated” and urges states to streamline interconnection, redesign rates so owners are paid for supporting the grid, and make enrollment as easy as tapping an app. 

The company estimates its current vehicle-to-home-capable fleet could in theory power roughly 120,000 homes for up to a week. 

But GM is not set up as a utility. Utilities are regulated monopolies with strict reliability obligations and long planning cycles; automakers ship hardware and let dealers handle customers. Persuading regulators to treat millions of privately owned cars as dependable capacity—rather than emergency backup—may take years of proof. Customers may also balk at having their batteries tapped regularly for modest bill credits, especially given worries about range and degradation. 

Still, the fact that Detroit is clearly courting utilities and data centers with retooled battery strategies is its own signal. For a decade, the EV story was about tailpipe emissions and Tesla envy. Now, as AI servers proliferate and NERC’s maps turn redder, GM wants to be seen as building an energy ecosystem that also moves people, and Ford is betting it can make steady money supplying grid-scale batteries while it retrenches around trucks and hybrids. Both have a message before the blackouts: We’re here to help.

For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com