Although electric vehicles cost a lot up front, over time the low price of electricity compared to that of gasoline will partly offset the initial expense. Many utilities, however, are experimenting with what's called demand-response pricing, in which the cost of power goes up along with demand—the cost is supposed to provide an incentive to shift consumption to times when it's easier to match it with the electric supply. Getting electric vehicles to integrate into this system would be a win for everyone: consumers would pay less per mile and utilities would limit the strain on their grids.

So far, getting consumer equipment to cooperate with demand-response systems has meant some form of "smart meter" and, in many cases, a "smart appliance"—and neither are widely available. But GM has given the Chevy Volt a fair degree of smarts when it comes to powering up, and it will even use its OnStar cellular service to help consumers and utilities coordinate vehicle charging.

Initial tests of the program will involve employees of regional utilities, who will receive leased Volts with the company's OnStar system, which enables two-way communications about the vehicle's status over cellular networks. In the pilot program, the employees can opt into two different programs. The system can be used to report basic information on the charge status and vehicle location back to the utility, allowing it to better understand typical usage patterns and plan for future expansion. In the more elaborate scheme, the vehicle will actually coordinate its charging with the utility, which can offer customers price breaks if they shift charging to off-peak hours.

Ars asked OnStar Electrification Product Manager Paul Pebbles a bit about the program. He said that the information won't flow directly from the cars to the utilities; instead, it will be served up by OnStar's backend databases. It therefore won't provide true realtime updates, but Pebbles said the data will get there "well within the utilities' needs."

Because the system is already integrated with the car's onboard electronics, no additional hardware is needed to allow users to control the charging. For the test program, the degree of control will be quite simple.

"We have the ability to either turn off charging or reduce it at very fine levels," Pebbles told Ars. "However, for this program, it is just to turn charging off."

Some experimental work has used electric vehicle batteries to help smooth electric grid frequency fluctuations, but the current program won't involve that level of coordination between the utilities and vehicles. Pebbles declined to comment on what GM might experiment with in the future.

The recently announced US government fuel efficiency standards will see the average car getting 55 miles a gallon by 2025, which suggests that electric and hybrid vehicles must be a growing part of the vehicle mix over the next decade. Programs like this are likely to be essential if we want to make that transition a smooth one.