Enrolling 10% of California EVs in V2G programs by 2036 could deliver a third of the state’s energy storage goals

California’s path to affordable energy bills starts in homes and driveways, according to a new report from GridLab, Kevala, and E3 that contains recommendations for how millions of customer-owned energy resources can improve electric grid operations in the Golden State.

The report, entitled Unlocking California’s Flexible Load, was written by authors from the three energy research and advisory groups who claim the state’s dual challenge of sharply rising electric rates and a power grid increasingly reliant on variable renewables can be met by its base of “controllable resources” — the millions of distributed energy resources located at customer sites across the state.

When it comes to controllable resources, the researchers point to EVs and distributed storage as the technologies that could have the most impact. 

“The next generation of grid infrastructure is already sitting in our driveways, homes, and businesses,” said GridLab executive director Ric O’Connell in a statement. “The question isn’t whether California has the resources — it’s whether our programs are designed to unlock their full value.”

The report’s authors say the opportunity to use these resources is now actionable because of the widespread use of advanced metering and the ability for these resources to be used for load management “without ongoing customer actions and lifestyle impacts.” 

They point to projections from the California Energy Commission (CEC) that show 9.7 million light-duty EVs are expected to be on California roads by 2036, bringing more than 110 GW of installed capacity behind the meter.

If these resources could supply power on a vehicle-to-grid basis that can be operated similarly to grid-scale storage, the researchers say just 10% of those EVs would be necessary to meet 30% of the state’s cumulative utility-scale storage procurement target for 2036 — but only with the right program design.

The authors say past attempts to design grid-benefit programs using DERs have failed for a number of reasons, including compensating enrollment over performance, requiring DERs to adhere to rules designed with wholesale generators in mind and eschewing program reform in favor of layering additional overlapping programs without addressing the underlying problems that limit customer participation.

Moving forward, the authors call for a small set of standardized, performance-verified pathways, anchored strictly to monetized avoided costs and advancing in parallel with retail rate reform. While they acknowledge that a laser-focus on avoided costs may limit customer participation in programs, they argue that the goal of improving energy affordability calls for assessing the services any such program can provide to the grid compared to the direct cost of alternative utility investments, without consideration for the potential societal benefits.

“Above all else, any new initiatives for flexible loads must be structured to pay only for incremental value from robustly measured performance and to avoid worsening the rate affordability pressures that the NEM/NBT cost shift has created,” the authors conclude.