Governing Mobile Batteries: The Challenges of Using Electric Vehicle Batteries as a Storage Service for Electricity Grids

With the increasing electrification of transportation, especially in relation to electric vehicles (EVs), there is a growing need to construct, govern, standardize and regulate the material and financial contact points. One aspect where both sectors obviously meet is charging, especially the smart charging strategies that mediate the impact of EVs on local distribution networks and include both controlled charging protocols and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) bi-directionality. While tracing its origin to the 1990s, V2G has only recently emerged as a promising and valid technology that uses electric vehicle batteries as a storage service for electricity grids. Based on additional bi-directional communication and electricity flows, V2G so far has remained limited to pilot-projects, but is witness to a rapid global increase in the number and scale of projects. This paper reflects on the technical, regulatory and market challenges encountered by these pilot projects on both the vehicle and the grid side, and extracts lessons for further socio-technical systems coupling across mobility and electricity. Among others, it highlights the need for political scientists and transition scholars to look more closely at the politics of standardization: a grey area where most of the actual systems-coupling takes place without outside observation or reflection. It also highlights the need for a willingness, politically and systemically, to open up existing market regulations that unintendedly act as a barrier for these new cross-sector technologies.