Just hooking up EV owners and not compensating them for the storage services they can provide won’t be a successful or popular idea. Rather the first step is to figure out what is the value of that storage? A new NREL study estimates that value to be about $59 per kW-year with a 33% RPS portfolio in California, increasing to $109/kW-year at a 40% RPS. For a typical EV, that could translate into $300 to $550 per year or $2,000 to $5,000 over 10 years.

Then you assess what are the incremental costs to the EV owner in reduced battery life. Note that batteries depleted 30% can’t be used for EVs any more but are still valuable for grid storage. Vendors probably can build in-home racks that store and connect the depleted batteries. Those become factors in determining the payments to the EV owners and their agents.

As for enrolling EV owners in a storage management program, it need not be cumbersome if enrollment is the default (opt-out) when buying a car or installing a charging station. (See all of the literature on the importance of opt-out vs. opt-in and status quo bias.) The auto dealer or charging administrator becomes the agent. An EV buyer might sign up for the program and not even know it. The charging process could work much like the massive distributed computing projects that harness small parts of the idle processors across millions of personal computers. All of this becomes part of the peer-to-peer transactive energy (TE) grid.