It could prove difficult to convince EV owners to sell energy back to electric utilities for a few cents at a time, but using a car battery as backup power for a home seems like a no-brainer.

While pilot programs for vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology are beginning to pop up in several states, vehicle-to-home (V2H) applications seem poised to gain traction more quickly.

Zoom in: Montreal-based startup dcbel is one example of the companies leading the…charge…on this effort. It offers a faster at-home EV-charging system that is capable of discharging energy back to the home in the case of a power outage.

• The company, which has raised more than $40 million since its founding in 2015, also uses AI to manage energy usage and can be installed with solar panels, resulting in cost savings and CO2 reduction.

Dcbel’s AI analysis shows that in the vast majority of cases, it’s “more useful” to use energy stored in an EV battery in the home than to send it back to the grid, Marc-André Forget, CEO of dcbel, told Emerging Tech Brew.

“[A] car is the second-largest investment for any family after [a] home. It sits on our driveway for 90% of the time, so we need to leverage that energy,” he said.

Looking ahead...Dcbel is entering the US market this year. The company is already taking reservations from customers in California, Texas, and New York—states that have historically experienced blackouts or hurricane-related outages—for deliveries later in 2022, Forget said. Dcbel plans to be in all 50 states, as well as the UK and France, by late 2023.

Keep reading about how EVs could be the backup generators of the future.—GD

Much has been made about the need to install solar panels, as the industry has grown at an average annual rate of 33% over the last decade.

But what happens at the other end of that process—when solar panels are ready to be discarded?

No standardized system for recycling panels—or tracking the process—currently exists in the US, per the LA Times, but research suggests only around 10% are currenty recycled in the US.

Enter: Solarcycle, a startup launched in 2022 to tackle that exact issue. The B2B-oriented company wants to build out its first facility by Q4, which it says will be capable of handling thousands of solar panels per year, and in June it announced a $6.6 million seed round.

• So far, it’s partnered with Sunrun, a major residential solar installer, and it aims to make the process of recycling solar panels less expensive than landfilling them.
• By 2030, the solar-panel recycling market could reach $2.7 billion, per a recent report from Rystad, an eye-popping jump from the current $170 million valuation.

As part of our ongoing Twitter Spaces series on climate tech, we sat down with Suvi Sharma, Solarcycle’s co-founder and CEO. Click here to keep reading about the future of solar recycling.—MB

Stat: SciFi Foods, a cultivated-meat company, claims it has found a way to reduce the cost of producing cultivated beef by 1,000x. High costs are one of the key barriers lab-grown meat companies have faced.

Quote: “All that material will eventually make another star, or another galaxy—and that’s the recycling nature of stellar life.”—Stefanie Milam, a scientist on the James Webb team, explaining last week’s photos to us

Read: Researchers are CRISPR-ing plants to try and capture a billion extra tons of CO2 from the air.

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Three of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out?

• AI-powered litter boxes are surging in popularity.
• NYC unveiled plans to convert some luxury apartments into vertical farms.
• Christie’s, the fancy-pants auction house, is getting into VC.
• Rolls-Royce and Hyundai are working on a…hydrogen-powered air taxi?

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Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• How synthetic biology startups plan to revolutionize fertilizer production
• How three startups working with large language models are thinking about ethics
• A conversation with DOE’s Jennifer Wilcox, who (literally) wrote the book on carbon capture