Report: Harnessing the Power of Electric Vehicles

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Report by Samantha Houston, David Reichmuth and Mark Specht, Union of Concerned Scientists, published on June 16, 2025.

To better understand the extent to which the Vehicle-Grid Integration (V1G) of light-duty EVs could aid California's transition to clean electricity, the Union of Concerned Scientists recently partnered with Evolved Energy Research to conduct an analysis of different levels of hourly managed V1G and V2G.

The analysis shows that VGI enables electricity system savings ranging from $1.8 billion (1 percent of system costs) to $11.7 billion (5 percent of system costs) per year in 2045. It also found that V2G creates significant incremental benefits over V1G alone.

One of the study's key findings: Taking the Medium VGI enrollment group as an example, the study found that enrolled vehicles on average generated annual benefits ranging from $503 in the all-V1G case to $1,177 for the all-V2G case in 2045. If these values were accumulated over the average lifetime of a vehicle, the cumulative grid savings per vehicle would range from about $6,000 to about $14,000.

To read an online version of the Executive Summary, click here.

Source: Union of Concerned Scientists

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