The secret’s to stagger provide and demand between when folks want energy to drive and after they want it to run their houses. “Yes, if everyone plugged in at the same time and charged a car at full power, that would not work on this antiquated model of charging,” says Jan Kleissl, director of the Center for Energy Research on the University of California, San Diego, who wasn’t concerned within the new modeling. “But if we are able to vary demand, then we can certainly make it work because no vehicle needs to charge 24 hours a day.” 

Commercial and authorities autos, like public transit or college buses, also can hook into V2G. An organization known as Nuvve, which develops V2G know-how, has been working with school districts in Southern California to show their buses—with their prodigious batteries—into V2G property. School buses run on a dependable schedule, so their batteries can feed energy to the grid after the children are dropped off, then recharge in time to choose them up the subsequent day. On weekends and holidays, a bus battery can be obtainable always. 

One of the perks of V2G is that it could subsidize the price of proudly owning an EV: The extra it sits in your storage, the more cash you make. “If you’re the type of person who can work from home and doesn’t have to drive your electric vehicle very often, then participating in V2G could likely make some revenue,” says Gasper. “So you’re providing more utility for the vehicle to help divert the cost of owning the vehicle, which is huge.”

You would possibly assume additional use would quickly degrade the battery, however that’s not at all times true. “If you own an EV and don’t drive it very often, V2G could actually extend the lifetime of your vehicle battery,” says Gasper. Discharging it infrequently is basically exercising it to maintain it wholesome. “There are two ways to kill a battery, and one is to have it sit fully charged all the time—why laptop batteries die very quickly. And the other one is to use it constantly.”

Wide-scale V2G faces some main challenges, although. For one factor, not each EV is supplied to do bidirectional charging, although automakers are more and more adopting these capabilities for autos just like the new Nissan Leaf and the Ford F-150. It additionally requires a particular charger that reverses the present to tug vitality out of the battery. Given these limitations, V2G continues to be in early growth, with round 100 pilot applications working worldwide. 

For one other, there’s no trade normal for the intersecting parts of V2G: Right now, there’s a patchwork of autos from totally different producers plugging into totally different charging techniques that themselves plug into totally different grids. 

And utilities would possibly supply totally different compensation, whether or not to particular person EV homeowners or a fleet operators. “One of the things we really need to learn is: What are the incentives that we need to offer drivers in both categories to get them to participate?” says Joseph Vellone of Ev.vitality, which makes software program that regulates EV charging and is working with a consortium of charger producers and automakers to check V2G methods.