Your Tesla can make your toast. Why not?

Consider the different participants in a potential vehicle-to-grid or V2G market. Utilities generally support technologies that help them avoid power outages, but cars are not a good substitute for dedicated grid-connected batteries. Trying to predict the behavior of owners – whether they are at home, whether they have plugged in their car and whether they have set discharge limits so that they have enough energy for a long intercity trip tomorrow – adds a whole new story. layer of complexity to the image. As a result, they are unlikely to pay as much for V2G electricity as they would for a standalone battery farm.

Car manufacturers are also cautious. With the EV market still in its infancy, battery degradation is a concern for many buyers. Automakers assuage these fears with warranties that typically last eight to 10 years, but a battery that is charged and discharged every day to power the grid is likely to deplete faster than a battery under normal use. In that situation, the owner’s V2G profit becomes the automaker’s warranty liability – an alarming prospect given all the money manufacturers are already spending on the switch to electric vehicles.

Some car companies have embraced a related way of using your battery: vehicle-to-home or V2H discharge, which powers only your own devices and puts less wear and tear on your power cells. Nevertheless, the shift has stalled and piecemeal: General Motors is rolling this out, but Ford will only do this with special and expensive charging stations. Meanwhile, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been a notable skeptic, though the company reportedly plans to introduce the technology next year.

Even individuals seem lukewarm about the idea. Cars are stationary 95 percent of the time. Using them like batteries when they’re parked seems like the perfect way to pay off that car loan – but the relatively modest uptake of things like car sharing and widespread indifference to depreciation costs suggests that owners aren’t all that interested in maximizing the revenues. on their investments.

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A truly valuable payment from the grid for a limited discharge that doesn’t get in the way of your daily commute would be perfect to whet the public’s appetite. However, these types of generous payments with robust consumer protections will likely prove less attractive to utilities. They would rather deal with a dedicated battery farm than rely on an unruly herd of householders to plug in at the right time.

All this represents a tragic inability to efficiently exploit the clean energy sources we have. While the world as a whole would benefit immensely from a large-scale shift to V2G, most players would see only marginal benefits or even disadvantages. If governments do not intervene to break this impasse, the current wasteful stagnation will continue.

David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change and energy. He previously worked for Bloomberg News, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.

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