Kristin Landry, Expert Product Manager, Pacific Gas & Electric
October 13, 2026
Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) has been one of the most active U.S. utilities exploring vehicle-grid integration (VGI), with work spanning residential backup power, grid-connected bidirectional charging, commercial fleets, microgrids, managed charging, and emerging dynamic-rate applications. As those efforts mature, the questions are shifting from whether bidirectional charging works to how utilities, automakers, charging providers, and customers can make it work at scale.
V2G News spoke with Kristin Landry, Expert Product Manager at PG&E, about what the utility is learning from its Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) Programs, how customers are responding, the growing range of bidirectional products entering the market, and the regulatory and operational challenges that remain. Landry leads implementation of PG&E’s Residential V2X Program and serves as an internal subject-matter expert on the different ways bidirectional EVs can connect to the grid.
A recurring theme throughout the conversation was simplicity. The technology is advancing, but customers still face a complicated journey involving vehicles, chargers, software providers, interconnection, rates, incentives, and program enrollment. Reducing that friction is emerging as one of the industry’s most important challenges.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
V2G News: To start, could you tell us about your professional background and your current role at PG&E?
Landry: I studied mechanical engineering as an undergraduate, and one of my first introductions to the energy space was through my university’s solar car team. That was really my introduction to both solar energy and electric vehicles.
I started my professional career in energy consulting at Navigant, which later became Guidehouse. I spent almost eight years working with large utilities and their regulators, researching and forecasting the adoption of emerging technologies that could be added to their portfolios of customer-facing energy-efficiency programs.
I left consulting and took a position at the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). I had come to the conclusion that engineering and technology were probably not going to be our biggest hurdles, and that maybe policy was more of the bottleneck. At the CPUC, I joined the team responsible for Rule 21 Interconnection, which is an important technical nexus for this space, and served as the vehicle-grid integration lead. I was there for about a year, and it was a really valuable educational experience for the role I am in now.
Now, I have been at PG&E for four years. I lead implementation of our Residential V2X Program, and I serve as an internal subject-matter expert on all the different ways to connect bidirectional EVs to the grid.
V2G News: What drew you specifically to vehicle-grid integration and bidirectional charging?
Landry: Bidirectional electric vehicles have been part of the vision for an efficient smart home for a long time. You plug in your electric vehicle, everything is connected, and everything coordinates. It has been a very long time coming, and now I understand that is because there are a lot of challenges involved in actually making it happen.
Given my earlier exposure to solar energy and electric vehicles, the opportunity to become the vehicle-grid integration lead for the Rule 21 Interconnection Team at the CPUC was a really fun connection point for me. I am grateful that I had that opportunity and have been able to continue working in this space.
V2G News: PG&E has been one of the more active utilities exploring V2X. Can you give us an overview of PG&E’s V2X Programs and what you are trying to learn from them?
Landry: PG&E proposed four pilots, and we received approval for three of them. I run what is now our Residential V2X Program. We also have a Commercial V2X Program that runs in parallel and is very similar, and we completed a vehicle-to-microgrid (V2M) demonstration.
For the V2M demonstration, we worked with the Redwood Coast Airport Microgrid in Humboldt County. We were able to demonstrate how electric vehicles could support an islanded microgrid where there were other storage and generation resources online.
The Residential and Commercial V2X Programs provide incentives to customers who purchase and install a bidirectional EV system, helping defray some of the cost of moving forward with a new technology. We are testing different use cases. On the residential side, the more popular use case so far has been backup power – when the grid goes down, the system can island the home, isolate it from the grid, and pull power from the vehicle to back up the home.
On the commercial side, we have school-bus depots that have been actively participating in our grid-tied use cases. Those sites can discharge vehicles while remaining connected to the grid and export power for compensation.
V2G News: Are residential customers also beginning to participate in grid-tied applications?
Landry: So far, our residential customers have primarily been participating in backup power. We do have customers going through interconnection now on the residential side, and they will be able to participate in grid-tied use cases as they complete that process.
We recently onboarded Bidirectional Energy and PowerFlex as two additional partners focused on technologies that can take residential customers through interconnection and regular grid interaction, with the goal of saving customers money on their electric bills. One of the things we are specifically testing is what we call Hourly Flex Pricing.
Bidirectional Energy and dcbel are grant-funding awardees, which allows them to provide additional incentives to customers who purchase and install this equipment. Part of that funding is tied to optimizing when these systems charge and discharge the EV to save customers money on their bills; the rate signal they are using for that optimization is Hourly Flex Pricing, which these customers can access through our pilots.
We do have customers who are interconnected. One of those interconnected customers is fully enrolled in the pilot, but that customer is served by a community choice aggregator that is not participating in the pilot, so they cannot access Hourly Flex Pricing. There are a lot of independent criteria a customer needs to meet to get all the way to that end state.
V2G News: PG&E also recently announced a Smart Charge Bundle with GM Energy. How does that fit into the broader VGI picture?
Landry: The Smart Charge Bundle is for unidirectional, or “V1G”, customers. It is a partnership offering where, at the point of sale, a customer purchasing a GM vehicle can receive a charger at no additional cost.
Half of the charger is funded through PG&E’s Residential EV Charging program and the other half is covered by GM. The customer can take the charger home, have it installed, and then receive $15 per month off their utility bill by staying enrolled in our managed charging program. GM has two different charger models that customers can use.
V2G News: What have been the most important lessons from the V2X Programs so far?
Landry: Simplify everything: the enrollment process, the incentives, the communication, operations, and data collection.
Everyone is new to this, and I am eternally grateful for the customers who engage and are willing to jump through all of the hoops. But there are a lot of hoops, and it is not going to scale this way. We will need to simplify a lot of things to make this broadly accessible.
At the same time, the opposite is also true: we need to be really flexible behind the scenes because every partnership looks a little different, and every product is supported by a different set of parties. On one end of the spectrum, you have Tesla, which is highly vertically integrated, and we work with Tesla throughout much of the process. In other technology stacks, different parties may be responsible for the vehicle, the charger, and the additional system components that make the charger bidirectional.
On the software side, you may have different parties holding responsibility for program enrollment, enrollment in the rate, integration with the utility for data sharing, and optimizing the charging and discharging. Given this complexity, we need flexibility around contracting, software integration, and coordination. And that doesn’t even cover installation and interconnection.
Ideally, we get to a place where all of this is simple for the customer. In this iteration, making it simple for the customer requires a lot of flexibility on the back end.
V2G News: What are you learning about the customer side of V2X?
Landry: There are a lot of hurdles for customers, and the first big one is simply awareness of the technology and understanding what it is capable of. Once customers understand that they could potentially use their EV to save money on their monthly electric bill, that gets people pretty excited. The hope is that their excitement helps carry them through all the steps required to complete the customer journey.
For the V2X Programs, we hired and onboarded a customer support specialist so customers have a real person they can talk to, someone who will call them back and proactively follow up to make sure they get through all of those steps. Customers have been really receptive to that and have responded very well. But again, that may not be particularly scalable, so we ultimately need to simplify the process in other ways.
V2G News: How important is backup power and resilience in creating customer interest in bidirectional charging?
Landry: In the United States especially, backup-power functionality has been how these products have primarily been marketed and sold. Part of the reason is that we do not yet have a well-defined pathway for customers to achieve bill savings with these products.
Our programs are designed to test how customers use this technology and understand what the value is to customers and to the grid. We are hoping to get good data out of the programs so we can study that value and make decisions about what these programs might look like moving forward.
V2G News: Based on what you are seeing, how would you characterize the current state of V2G technology and the industry?
Landry: We are moving! We have gotten from zero to one.
When I started at PG&E, we ran a pilot with two demonstration sites. Today, what I am running is much more of a program. It is open to any customer in our territory who meets the eligibility criteria.
We have 19 EV models across nine brands available to residential customers, and they pair with five chargers. There are a lot of different types of vehicles that now have this technical capability, and I am really proud of our ability to support that wide range of products. It has taken a lot of work on the back end, but providing that customer choice is part of what makes this such an ambitious V2X effort.
V2G News: What needs to happen for V2G to move from today’s pilots and early programs to meaningful scale?
Landry: I used to describe the three key barriers as availability, affordability, and accessibility. On availability, we are getting there. There are increasingly more vehicles and products with bidirectional capability.
On affordability, we have been tackling the issue with incentives, but we are also seeing a wave of AC V2G products coming into the residential space that should be much more affordable. Tesla has an AC product now, and there are more coming, so that should help address the affordability challenge.
What we are increasingly left with is my catch-all bucket of accessibility. That includes everything from customer awareness and education to aggregator business models, ease of program enrollment, and interconnection. Everything that creates friction in the customer journey falls into that accessibility bucket, and I think that is the remaining challenge for us as an industry.
V2G News: Are there particular regulatory, market-design, or operational issues that will need to be addressed to support larger-scale deployment?
Landry: One of the things we have encountered is that the CPUC required us to use a dynamic rate for the grid-tied use case in these programs . Our experience with that has produced a number of challenges and learnings, and really working out the appropriate compensation mechanism for what this asset can do for us remains an evolving challenge.
There is growing interest in virtual power plant (VPP) configurations, and there is also the question of whether there will be another iteration of a dynamic rate that works better for customers. On the Residential V2X –Program side, I currently have a small number of grid-tied customers. We are working to grow that customer group so we can get enough data to be able to draw some sort of conclusions.
V2G News: Could the value proposition look different for commercial customers than it does for residential customers?
Landry: It certainly looks different for commercial customers with different use cases. School buses have a clearer value proposition because we know when they are on the road, when they are parked, and how much battery they need by the time they leave the lot.
Residential customers are much more varied, and it is not as clear as what we can count on those resources to provide. We know that they are going to be a distributed resource, which has its own value, but we have not yet been able to quantify that value very well.
V2G News: Where could bidirectional EVs ultimately fit within PG&E’s broader strategy for transportation electrification, grid flexibility, and distributed energy resources?
Landry: I love having a CEO who champions this technology. We know that transportation electrification produces what we call beneficial load growth. Adding EVs to the grid means that we can spread our revenue requirement across more kilowatt-hours, so adding EVs means lower rates for all customers, not only those with EVs. That downward rate pressure is incredibly valuable to us.
We are evolving that analysis to ask: In addition to adding the load of an EV, if that load is flexible, what benefit does that flexibility add? And having grid-tied bidirectional flexibility, as opposed to having only the charging be flexible, could be an order of magnitude more valuable.
The way I have been thinking about it, and starting to describe it, is that having a bidirectional EV on-site makes all of your other use cases flexible. You do not need to schedule your dishwasher if you can program your car to cover the power demand of your dishwasher. These vehicles have enormous batteries and significant power capabilities, so they can reshape the load of an entire home through a single asset.
I think that is really powerful when we think not just about managing load from a single-home perspective but more broadly across the network as well. That is the theory we are now trying to put the analytical framework around: What is the contribution to margin of adding not only this load, but also the flexibility associated with that load being bidirectional?
V2G News: What should the V2G News audience be paying particular attention to as the V2X market develops?
Landry: It has been a really exciting space to work in, and bringing my interconnection background into this role has been really gratifying. Interconnection is increasingly becoming a focus area for process improvement.
I am incredibly excited about the next 12 months as we get more residential customers interconnected and begin collecting this data, but also about the next couple of years as more products—especially AC V2G products—come out and lower-cost options become more widely available to customers. I am hoping we see the scale that will be required for this technology to have the kind of impact we are looking for.
