New real-world V2G trials show EVs can generate significant income for drivers — and the technology is ready now

Electric vehicles with vehicle-to-grid (V2G) capability can serve as more than just a means of transport.

In a recent webinar with the Electric Vehicle Society, Dalhousie University physics professor and head of the Jeff Dahn Research Group, renowned battery researcher Dr. Jeff Dahn explains that the idea of V2G is to use an EV to store electricity from the grid and deliver it back when needed.

“The time you would want to start is when renewables are abundant on the grid, or when electricity prices are high,” said Dahn in his presentation.

“During the day, when the sun is shining and [there is] a lot of solar, you would charge batteries that are in vehicles, doing vehicle to grid. Then, at night, when there’s no sun, you would deliver energy back to power homes and towns.”

And, says Dahn, because EV owners are essentially lending their vehicle as battery storage to the grid they should be compensated for it.

Real-world case test

Dahn points to a case study from French EV and software company Ampere, which has developed V2G hardware and software for the Renault 5 EV.

For six months, Ampere has been testing the technology on about 500 vehicles and inviting drivers to participate in the process.

Through the Renault app, owners can schedule V2G sessions and set a minimum state of charge (SOC). The car communicates with the charger, which instructs the home charging box to either store energy or send it back to the grid. The app also reports how much energy was moved and the earnings from each session.

“This is set up to be convenient and allow you to have a situation where your car is never delivered to you in a state that you can’t drive it,” said Dahn.

Ampere’s data shows that battery degradation from V2G is minimal. A car driving 20,000 kilometres per year would retain about 94 per cent of its original battery capacity after 10 years, found the data.

If a vehicle is participated in V2G and delivering around five megawatt-hours per year for eight years that amounts to only about 100 equivalent full cycles per year, said Dahn. Over 10 years, the total accumulated use would be just 1,500 equivalent full cycles.

“This is fully believable,” Dahn said. He adds that at a rate of $0.20 per kilowatt-hour, earning from five megawatt-hours per year would total about $10,000 over 10 years for customers.

During the trial, session lengths ranged from a few hours to 800 hours. On average, each vehicle delivered or stored about 0.5 megawatt-hours over six months, which translates to roughly $230 per year at Nova Scotia’s electricity rates.

“Users learn that this is not harming the vehicle in any way,” Dahn said.

“If they leave themselves plugged in longer and adjust the app to allow larger state-of-charge ranges, they can earn more money. So that’s kind of cool. I think this is a really nice test case with good data — really interesting.”

Scaling V2G

Dahn sees potential in scaling V2G in North America.

“We’ve seen that one EV doing vehicle-to-grid can easily store and deliver one megawatt-hour per year.,” he says. “A million EVs doing V2G could store and deliver a terawatt-hour per year.”

This could play a crucial role as electricity demand grows alongside EV adoption and energy-intensive sectors like AI data centres.

In Canada, interest in V2G is already building, says Dahn.

Montreal-based company, dcbel, is developing V2G technology and Nova Scotia is running a pilot for bi-directional EVs.

“I think it will become a situation where certain jurisdictions are going to start to say, ‘if you want to put an EV in my area, it [will need to] be vehicle-to-grid enabled, so that we can deploy it in such a way in order to meet our energy demands and bring more renewables on the grid,’” says Dahn.