High electricity bill? Frequent power outages? Your car company wants to help.

In their quest to sell EVs, automakers are turning to a new business line: home energy products. They see multiple benefits to getting into the energy management game, from sweetening the proposition of EV ownership to creating new revenue streams.

Research suggests that consumers are receptive to the idea: Escalent’s 2025 Home Energy Solutions DeepDive report identified opportunities for automakers and utilities to team up on home energy solutions, and found strong new-car buyer trust in automakers to “manage the production and use of energy in their home.” More than two in five (43%) would even buy electricity from their vehicle brand.

Automakers are marketing products like bidirectional chargers and stationary battery storage solutions to customers as ways to save money and become less reliant on the whims of the power grid—and offering up leasing options and incentives to sweeten the deal.

“The real difference is, when can an EV do things that an ICE car can’t do? That’s mobile battery storage—a battery on wheels. The ability to tap into that battery storage, either to power your home for backup or to send power to the grid for rate arbitrage, all those kinds of things,” Loren McDonald, CEO and chief analyst at Chargeonomics, told Tech Brew.

“What we’ve seen is that most of the automakers just didn’t make that bidirectional charging capability available on their vehicles,” he added. “And it’s really just starting to explode in the last year. Most of the new models that are going to be coming out, and the next-generation ones, are going to have that capability.”

Keep reading here.—JG

When California recently passed a first-in-the-nation law to regulate catastrophic risk in frontier AI models, New York was also in striking distance of the same distinction.

The Empire State’s legislature passed a similar bill, called the RAISE Act, in June, which has been waiting on a signature from the governor ever since. The bill would require large frontier AI developers to publish safety plans and prohibit the release of models with catastrophic risk—i.e., mass casualties or billion-dollar damages.

Alex Bores, a Democratic assembly member who co-authored the bill, told us Governor Kathy Hochul has until roughly the end of the year to act on it. VC firms and tech industry groups are currently lobbying against it.

Meanwhile, Bores has become one of a growing number of Democrats—nine and counting—to join the race for New York’s 12th Congressional District in mid- and upper Manhattan. He thinks AI policy will help him stand out from the pack.

But it’s also put him in the tech industry’s cross-hairs. Leading the Future, a $100-million super PAC funded by various venture capital firms and AI companies, told Politico this week (after our conversation) that it would take aim at Bores’s NY-12 campaign as its first target.

We spoke with Bores about the role of state legislation in AI, his background in tech, and how he’s making AI policy part of his campaign pitch.

Keep reading here.—PK

Offshore wind has had a tough year: The Trump administration put a moratorium on seven major offshore wind leases at the beginning of the year, and went on to withdraw funding from 12 projects and outright cancel another. On top of all that, the entire wind energy industry lost its clean energy tax credits.

But a new report on the renewable energy source’s viability from consultancy Charles River Associates found that offshore wind is well-suited to solve energy dilemmas posed by new peak demand times and crowded areas in need of more electrons.

One of those dilemmas is rising winter energy needs. Even though seasonal temperatures are rising, peak demand has gone from summer to winter on the East Coast as a result of the increasing electrification of heating. Offshore wind produces “its highest output during extreme cold events,” meaning it’s particularly suited to provide power during the winter when the grid is stressed.

“Risks are shifting increasingly to winter from historical periods of summer stress, given the way the grid mix is evolving,” Oliver Stover, an associate principal with Charles River Associates, said in a webinar on the report. “On the East Coast, wind often blows the hardest on those really cold days, which is a really nice synergy.”

Keep reading here.—TC

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