Vehicle-to-Grid - Parkonomics

Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) is the use of parked electric vehicles as a distributed battery, discharging stored energy back to the grid when demand or prices are high and recharging when they are low. It is the most ambitious form of bidirectional charging and the least developed commercially.

Vehicle-to-grid is the furthest-reaching form of bidirectional charging: parked cars discharge to the grid at peak and recharge when power is cheap. Promising in models, not yet a working market.

The projections

The CEC’s 2030 scenario has 2.3 million California EVs available to discharge in a given week, for 4.1 to 5 gigawatts of peak reduction.
GridLab, Kevala, and E3 estimate that enrolling 10 percent of the state’s EVs by 2036 would provide about 9 gigawatts for 12 hours, roughly a third of California’s long-duration storage target.

The caveat

These are models. Compensation rules, interconnection process, and hardware cost have not been settled, and no substantial V2G market operates today. Parkonomics treats V2G as a promise to plan around, not revenue to bank.