Realizing the Value of Vehicle-to-Grid for Industrial Consumers: Investment Viability and Market Design Considerations

(V2G) technology, which allows electric vehicles (EVs) to both draw electricity from and discharge power back to the grid. This bidirectional capability can improve grid stability, mitigate peak demand, and facilitate the integration of distributed energy resources. In liberalized electricity markets like Russia’s, where electricity and capacity are traded separately, V2G offers large industrial consumers opportunities to optimize energy costs while supporting decarbonization efforts. Large and medium consumers in Russia’s wholesale market exposed to both electricity and capacity components in their bills. Electricity charges are based on hourly energy consumption, while capacity charges reflect power demand during designated peak hours. This dual-pricing mechanism prevents significant overall price volatility and encourages strategic load management creating incentives for demand-side innovations such as V2G. This study assesses the techno-economic viability of V2G for industrial consumers in Russia’s wholesale market across different regions. The primary objective is to evaluate the potential of

V2G under varying regional pricing structures, to reduce electricity and capacity costs, and facilitate the adoption of emerging technologies. This work develops a comprehensive technoeconomic model and evaluates it under near-realistic conditions, incorporating representative industrial load characteristics, EV charging infrastructure and vehicle parameters, and electricity market and capacity pricing rules. The analysis is conducted across three scenarios— base, conservative, and negative—to assess performance robustness under varying market and operational assumptions. Results show that, under the modeled assumptions, the V2G scheme remains economically viable across all six-studied regions and all tested scenarios within the 10-year horizon.

Profitability is primarily driven by two factors: the magnitude of capacity-cost savings achievable through peak shaving and the effective peak–off-peak electricity price spread after accounting for efficiency losses and charging/discharging settlement. These findings highlight

V2G’s ability to generate reliable price signals that align with market requirements and encourage end-user engagement. V2G yields greater benefits in areas with higher capacity charge shares, owing to enhanced peak-load reduction potential.

While grounded in the Russian context, the insights are applicable to other liberalized markets featuring separate electricity and capacity pricing and price variations across regions, like in those with LMP or zonal structures.