Parked electric vehicles may be more valuable than the industry has treated them

As renewable electricity grows, power systems are confronting a familiar technical problem in a sharper form: generation and demand do not always line up. Solar and wind output can surge when demand is low and fall when consumption peaks. A pilot project in Delaware now suggests that electric vehicles could help absorb that imbalance, with owners potentially earning meaningful income in the process.

According to the supplied New Scientist source text, researchers led by Willett Kempton at the University of Delaware monitored four Ford electric vehicles owned by Delmarva Power through 2025 after retrofitting them for vehicle-to-grid, or V2G, charging. Based on the amount of electricity those vehicles supplied back to the system, each EV could have earned as much as $3,359 annually if that energy had been sold at market price.

That figure is attention-grabbing, but the broader point is more important: electric cars may be able to function as distributed storage assets rather than just transportation devices. If so, they could help make renewable-heavy grids cheaper and more reliable without requiring all balancing capacity to come from dedicated stationary battery projects.

The logic is straightforward: most cars sit parked most of the time

The case for V2G starts with a simple utilization fact. The source text says some data suggests the average EV is driving as little as 5 percent of the time. For the remaining 95 percent, it is often parked and plugged in. That means a large amount of battery capacity exists but is idle from the grid’s point of view.

Kempton argues that plugged-in EVs can provide storage at about one-tenth the cost of building batteries for the same purpose. The concept is to charge vehicles when electricity supply is abundant and discharge some of that energy back to the grid during morning and evening peaks. Owners would still have mobility, but the battery would also perform paid balancing work for the power system.

In a grid increasingly supplied by renewables, that kind of flexibility is valuable. More flexible storage makes it easier to integrate intermittent generation while avoiding curtailment during high-output periods and reducing stress during demand surges.