November 18, 2025
This article is the third installment in our V2G Value Series. The first article explored the often-overlooked customer-facing benefits of bidirectional charging, from lowering the total cost of EV ownership to enhancing household and fleet resilience. The second article introduced a structured framework for understanding grid-facing value across three categories: behind-the-meter optimization, avoided-cost-based programs, and market participation. That framework helped clarify where V2G value comes from and why stakeholders often talk past one another.
Despite growing clarity around the benefits of bidirectional charging, V2G has struggled to move beyond pilots into sustained commercial deployment. The core issue is no longer technical feasibility; it’s the inability to translate V2G’s demonstrated value into the kind of predictable, durable revenue streams that attract private capital. Understanding why this gap persists is essential to understanding what it will take for V2G to scale.
Understanding the Missing-Money Problem
Even as the technical case for V2G strengthens, the economic case remains incomplete. Bidirectional EVs can support reliability, integrate renewable energy, and provide grid services, but the revenue streams available to project developers and fleet operators are still too limited, too uncertain, and too fragmented to justify the capital investments required.
This dynamic came into sharp focus in the academic research featured in this edition’s V2G Intelligence feature, which showed how V2G can catalyze new investment in wind and solar generation. Those benefits accrue to the grid and to society, through lower system costs, reduced curtailment, and deeper renewable penetration, but they do not accrue to the EV owner or V2G aggregator. That gap between who benefits and who gets paid is a core part of the challenge.
In other words, V2G suffers from a classic missing-money problem: the societal benefits are real and substantial, but the compensation available to private developers and customers does not reflect them.
A second dimension of missing money is structural. Energy markets and retail tariffs were built around large, centralized, unidirectional assets, not around distributed, mobile storage embedded in personal vehicles, school buses, and commercial fleets. Because of this design bias, resources like V2G rarely qualify for the same revenue streams available to utility-scale generators or standalone batteries.
A clear example is capacity accreditation. While large storage projects can earn predictable capacity payments through ISO/RTO markets, aggregated EVs generally cannot. They lack an established pathway to qualify as firm capacity, and even under FERC Order 2222, implementation barriers, telemetry requirements, and minimum-size thresholds make participation impractical. As a result, V2G assets are excluded from one of the most important and stable revenue streams on the grid, leaving them dependent on fragmented, seasonal, or event-based programs that financiers view as inherently risky.
V2G is therefore a textbook case of the structural missing-money problem. Even when pilots demonstrate measurable grid value, the mechanisms available to monetize that value rarely translate into bankable cash flows. Without bankability, capital does not move, and without capital, V2G remains stuck in pilots rather than evolving into a scalable grid resource.
What New York’s Energy Storage Roadmap Reveals About Missing Money
New York’s 6 GW Energy Storage Roadmap, published in 2024, offers one of the clearest official assessments of this gap. Despite strong climate mandates, an expanded Investment Tax Credit, and a rapidly growing need for flexible capacity, the Roadmap concludes that federal tax incentives “are insufficient on their own to overcome the remaining cost gap,” and that “current wholesale market revenue is insufficient to support energy storage deployment.”
The Roadmap goes deeper, describing:
As highlighted in other sections of this Roadmap, one of the most critical barriers to energy storage projects relates to the uncertain and insufficient nature of the revenue available through existing markets and tariffs, particularly capacity revenue. Retail or distribution-level projects, participating in certain regions through VDER, provide investors with a more certain revenue stream; however, these projects are still difficult to underwrite given the variable nature of both capacity and energy prices. New York’s 6 GW Energy Storage Roadmap, page 33
To close the gap for bulk storage, New York uses the Index Storage Credit (ISC), a long-term procurement mechanism that pays only the incremental revenue required to bring projects to their cost of capital, bridging the difference between the revenue assets can earn in today’s markets and what they need to be financeable. The logic is clear: markets and tariffs designed for earlier grid conditions will not, on their own, finance the flexible resources required for a high-renewables grid.
These challenges do not only apply to large grid-scale batteries. While New York’s retail storage incentive programs support distribution-connected batteries up to 5 MW, and explicitly justify incentives based on the gap between modeled revenue and project costs, V2G systems remain ineligible for these mechanisms. That exclusion makes the missing-money problem even more acute for bidirectional EVs, which combine the economic hurdles of storage with additional complexity around duty cycles, customer behavior, and mobility.
From Value Stack to Bankable Stack
The challenge, then, is not identifying V2G value, it is converting that value into predictable revenue that supports financing. New York’s approach to storage offers a potential model for V2G: begin with markets where they exist, quantify the gap, and design mechanisms that fill only the incremental amount required to make projects viable. This structure respects market signals while providing stability for investors.
Applying this concept to V2G could take several forms:
- Multi-year V2G compensation contracts tied to peak reduction, local capacity needs, or renewable integration.
- Up-front incentives for bidirectional chargers paired with long-term performance-based payments.
- Utility procurement of V2G flexibility as a grid resource, similar to non-wires alternatives.
- Aggregator contracts that blend BTM value, avoided-cost program participation, and market-aligned flexibility payments into a single bankable product.
The common thread is intentionally bridging the missing-money gap, not replacing market revenue, but making revenue complete enough to support deployment.
Why Closing the Gap Matters Now
V2G stands at an inflection point. Automakers are starting to ship bidirectional-capable vehicles. Charger manufacturers are securing UL 1741 SB certifications. Utilities are piloting V2G for school buses, residential customers, and fleets. Academic research, including the study highlighted in this edition, shows that V2G can stimulate renewable energy investment.
The pieces are falling into place. But scale will not happen on technical merit alone. It requires capital, and capital requires predictable cash flows.
