Your electric car might have a secret talent. Beyond soaking up electrons from the grid, a growing number of EVs can push energy back into it — a trick known as vehicle-to-grid, or V2G. And utilities are willing to pay drivers for the privilege of tapping their batteries when demand spikes.
On July 26, 2026, a coalition of companies — Eversource, National Grid, EnergyHub, Sunrun, and the Mobility House — launched an early test of the technology in Massachusetts, letting utility customers give V2G a spin. Participants hook into an existing program called ConnectedSolutions, which already lets homes run off residential batteries. When a “demand response” event is called — think a summer heat wave with everyone blasting the AC — enrolled EV batteries pitch in to keep the grid afloat, and owners get compensated, much like homeowners feeding solar power back to the network.
The reassuring part for range-anxious drivers: this isn’t a constant drain.
- Occasional, not daily: “It’s really kind of a small number of hours per year that you’re discharging the battery,” said Russell Vare of the Mobility House North America. Discharges happen only during those peak events.
- Massive capacity: A typical EV battery holds around six times the capacity of a backup unit mounted outside a house. Predictable fleets like school buses and municipal vehicles are especially juicy targets.
- Cheap flexibility: “It’s the cheapest cost of flexible energy storage that will be available for the grid,” Vare said.
Why the sudden enthusiasm? Utilities are wedged between overlapping pressures. Electricity demand is climbing as data centers multiply and drivers swap combustion engines for EVs and gas furnaces for heat pumps. Meanwhile, the shift to wind and solar introduces intermittency — the sun sets, the wind stalls — so grids desperately need somewhere to bank energy. Building battery farms and stringing new transmission lines works, but it’s expensive, and Americans are already reeling from rising energy prices.
V2G offers a shortcut. Utilities don’t have to reinvent the whole system; the batteries are already out there, sitting idle in driveways. Owners need a bidirectional charger to send power back, and those aren’t universal yet — but more models, like the Nissan Leaf, arrive equipped for it. “As hardware costs come down, installation becomes simpler, and standards continue to mature, we expect vehicle-to-grid to become dramatically more accessible over the next several years,” said Seth Frader-Thompson, president of EnergyHub.
The genius lies in aggregation. Only a fraction of owners need to opt in to meaningfully support the grid. “If you have a higher number of batteries out there in a virtual power plant, you can actually use less energy from each individual battery,” said Chip Silverman of Sunrun. “Collectively… it comes out to a very large resource. And that’s really where the magic is.”
The Massachusetts pilot lets participants specify when they typically need their car — commuting to work, say — so the system pushes power out during evening peaks and refills overnight. Paired with staggered “active managed charging,” the result flips the script: instead of straining the grid toward collapse, EVs could help save it.
