Lessons Learned from Cutting-Edge Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) Projects of Bus Fleets

Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables, a leading research firm at the forefront of topics including renewable energy penetration, grid-edge technologies, and grid flexibility, is looking to better understand the potential for electric buses (e-buses) to participate in Vehicle-To-Everything (V2X) bus projects. Drawing from six V2X e-bus case studies in California, Michigan, New York, Virginia, Massachusetts, and the United Kingdom, this project provided both utilities and fleet operators strategies to scale the V2X market. 

V2X-enabled e-buses have the potential to act as flexible distributed energy resources (DERs), a crucial grid asset as variable renewable energy penetration increases in the grid. However, the V2X market is still in its infancy due to a lack of understanding of the various V2X use cases. The purpose of this report was to present stakeholders with the potential value-add that V2X services can provide and propose mitigation measures for key market barriers.  

The report identified policies needed to scale V2X projects with e-buses, analyzed lessons learned from the pilot projects, and provided suggestions for regulators in designing future pilots. The main takeaways are threefold: (1) Regulators and utilities should define the range of value propositions for V2X use cases in order to monetize them; (2) the impact of battery degradation should be further tested to mitigate contract risk around battery performance; and (3) designing sustainable V2X programs requires identifying funding sources and ownership models that are built to scale, and incorporating equity mandates to ensure that underserved communities benefit from investment in clean technologies.