Vehicle-to-Grid: Quo vadis? Readiness check of the technology landscape for integrating electric vehicles into the smart grid

Vehicle-to-Grid scenarios show high potential to overcome the challenges of increased energy demand especially in low-voltage grids due to the strong expected ramp-up of electric vehicles (EV) within the upcoming years in Europe. Instead of solving this challenge by relying on conventional grid expansion, which would lead to high investment costs for electrical infrastructure and long lead times, the Vehicle-to-Grid approach provides a more short-term solution in order to avoid critical loads in low-voltage grids, support prosumer movements towards smart grid, optimize local energy consumption, gain electricity savings for EV fleet owners and stabilize the grid by temporarily leveraging electric vehicles’ (EV) battery capacities as flexibilities and feeding energy capacity back into the grid during times of high electricity demand.Besides the challenges of developing sustainable and scalable business models or investigating the status quo of the regulatory framework, this paper focuses on a readiness check of the technical landscape for integrating EVs into the smart grid. After describing motivation and background of this paper (chapter 1 ), target charging use cases for bidirectional charging are introduced and Vehicle-to-Grid scenarios for this paper are defined (chapter 2 ). Then the status quo of charging infrastructure ecosystem for defined Vehicle-to-Grid scenarios incl. main technical requirements are described (chapter 3 ), before the results of the readiness check for technical implementation of V2G scenarios are shown and summary of key findings and outlook for future studies and projects are given.