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It sounds like a futurist’s dream scenario: drive your electric car to work, get out, plug it in and let it power the building. But in Newark, Delaware, it’s about to become a reality - at least on a very small scale. The system is an Energy Department experiment that could point the way toward a greener future.

Delaware’s News-Journal explains, “The City of Newark has become the first electric utility to allow a two-way flow of energy between vehicles and the grid.” A grant from the U.S. Department of Energy has allowed the city of Newark and the University of Delaware to buy a total of five Scion Xbs converted to run on electricity, and “equipped with software that communicates with [the] regional energy grid.” Each car charges itself when plugged into the grid, but has “the capability of sending electricity back into the grid, if…the regional grid manager needs it.”

Each vehicle can send only a tiny amount of electricity into the public grid, so five vehicles won’t make much of an impact. “But if there were a few hundred such vehicles on the road, that would be enough to make a palpable difference,” according to Professor Willet Kempton. “That might even allow car owners to make money when [the regional electric company] buys their electricity back.”

To make the system work on a massive scale would require a huge investment. “What Delaware needs now, besides the EV cars,” Autoblog Green notes, “is a complete network of garages, apartment parking lots and city streets outfitted with the right size plugs.” That’s no small outlay, but “the grid is actually ready to go,” and such a system could be added gradually.

Of course, with purely electric cars, the system is just an energy loop - the cars would draw energy from the grid and send it back into the grid. But as technologies like hydrogen-powered cars become more realistic, it is possible to build a system where driving would ultimately provide the electricity to power homes and offices. With electric cars dominating the list of future cars on display at this week’s Detroit Auto Show, the experiment in Newark may be a sign of what’s to come.

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