Could Your EV Help Save the Grid? Massachusetts Launches V2G Pilot

A new pilot program in Massachusetts is turning electric vehicles into mobile power plants. A coalition of companies—Eversource, National Grid, EnergyHub, Sunrun, and the Mobility House—is launching a vehicle-to-grid (V2G) project that allows EV owners to send energy back to the grid when demand spikes. Participants join the existing ConnectedSolutions program, which already includes home battery systems.

During demand response events, like heat waves, EV batteries discharge power to help the grid cope. Owners are compensated for this service, similar to solar panel users. Discharges occur only a few hours per year, not daily—just during peak times. "It's really kind of a small number of hours per year that you're discharging the battery," said Russell Vare of the Mobility House.

Utilities face growing challenges: rising electricity demand from data centers, EVs, and heat pumps, plus the shift to intermittent renewables like wind and solar. V2G offers a cheap form of flexible energy storage. "It's the cheapest cost of flexible energy storage that will be available for the grid," Vare added.

Participants need a bidirectional charger to send energy back. While not all EVs support V2G, models like the Nissan Leaf do. Costs for bidirectional chargers are expected to fall. "As hardware costs come down, installation becomes simpler, and standards continue to mature, we expect vehicle-to-grid to become dramatically more accessible over the next several years," said Seth Frader-Thompson of EnergyHub.

Vehicles with predictable schedules, like school buses and municipal fleets, are especially useful due to their large batteries. Even a typical EV battery has about six times the capacity of a home backup unit. Only a fraction of owners need to participate to support the grid, but more participants create a broader base. "If you have a higher number of batteries out there in a virtual power plant, you can actually use less energy from each individual battery," said Sunrun's Chip Silverman. "Collectively, when you patch them all together and aggregate them, it comes out to a very large resource. And that's really where the magic is."

Early projects are developing coordination tools, like apps that let users specify their driving schedules. The goal is for EVs to send power back during peak evening hours and charge overnight. V2G promises to make consumers active grid participants, strengthening reliability and potentially lowering electricity costs for everyone.