Picture a small electric Renault parked on a street in Utrecht. It belongs to a car-sharing fleet, and right now nobody has booked it. Most cars would simply sit there. This one is working. Through a bidirectional charger, it is pushing electricity back into one of the most congested power grids in Europe, helping the local network stay below its limits during the evening peak. Tomorrow morning someone will drive it to a meeting and never notice.
That is vehicle-to-grid, or V2G: an electric vehicle that can not only draw power from the grid but also send it back when the grid needs it. The idea has been around for years. What is new is that it is finally leaving the lab. At The Drop in Malmö this September, our Director of IR and Comms Bryony Cooper sat down with Claire Miller for a live on-stage conversation. Claire led Octopus Energy's Powerloop, one of the first domestic V2G trials, and today advises companies across mobility and energy, including two in the PT1 portfolio. Here is what we took away.
A battery that is already there
Start with a simple observation. Europe is spending enormous effort, energy and raw materials on building batteries. Millions of them are going into cars, vans and trucks that spend most of their lives parked. At the same time, grids are struggling. Renewables produce power when the sun shines and the wind blows, not when people cook dinner. In the Netherlands, grid congestion is already so severe that new connections can take years.
As Claire put it, once we have built a battery and put wheels on it, we should think hard about its second job. Utrecht did exactly that. The city set itself the goal of becoming the world's first bidirectional city, brought together local government, grid operators and innovators such as We Drive Solar, and is now rolling out 500 bidirectional Renault vehicles in a car-sharing fleet. By the partners' estimate, that fleet can supply around a tenth of the flexibility the region needs to balance solar and wind. Every kilowatt-hour those cars shift is cable, transformer and substation capacity the grid operator does not have to build.
The first job comes first
The line that stuck with us most was the plainest one. A vehicle has a job to do. It takes someone to the station, delivers parcels, carries a patient. Supporting the grid comes second, always.
It sounds obvious, yet Claire has seen pilots fail precisely because they forgot it. A fleet operator is sold a beautiful V2G concept, and then reality intervenes: the van needs to be on the road exactly when the model assumed it would be plugged in. The use cases that work are the ones where the vehicle's daily routine and the grid's needs line up by design.
Her favourite example is the humble bin lorry. Garbage trucks run on a fixed schedule, often overnight in big cities. They carry large batteries because they are heavy and get heavier as they fill up, and for years to come those batteries will be bigger than the route strictly requires. So they come back to the depot with charge to spare in the early evening, exactly when the grid is under the most strain, and they can recharge flexibly overnight. Big battery, predictable timetable, idle at the right moment. Nobody pitches garbage trucks at a climate conference, but this is what a good V2G asset looks like.
Why it isn't everywhere yet
If the logic is so compelling, why can't you buy it everywhere today? The answer has less to do with technology than with plumbing.
The first bottleneck is standards. Plugging a car battery into the grid touches a thicket of rules on testing, certification and grid connection, and each market handles it differently. There is still no routine path for a carmaker to book a test, get a certificate and ship a V2G-ready model across Europe. Work to harmonise European grid codes will help, and the Nordics and the UK are moving in the same direction.
The second is the business model. Claire was candid: there are no consumer propositions at real scale yet, meaning hundreds and hundreds of cars proving that customers trust the system and that someone makes money. The value exists, because every grid has to balance supply and demand, and in open markets that balancing is paid for. In the UK, she estimates, simply letting an aggregator decide when your car charges can already be worth a few hundred pounds a year.
The third is awareness. Most drivers do not know that such markets exist, let alone that their car could take part. Claire's experience is that once the penny drops, people ask why this isn't happening already.
The myth that refuses to die
The objection she hears most, even from people inside the EV industry, is that V2G will wear out your battery. It is an understandable instinct from a century of engines that wear down with use. Batteries behave differently. Early data suggest that the gentle cycling of home V2G, at seven to twenty-two kilowatts, can actually help condition a battery rather than degrade it. Regulation adds a safety net: under the EU's Euro 7 rules, car batteries must retain at least 80 percent of their capacity for five years or 100,000 kilometres, and carmakers typically back them with eight-year warranties. The companies launching V2G products know their batteries better than anyone, and they are the ones setting the rules for how those batteries may be used.
Who gets paid?
The real open question is how the value gets shared. An audience member offered a neat analogy: the cheaper, ad-supported Kindle. Could carmakers sell a discounted car in exchange for managing its battery? Claire's answer was yes, and. She expects a spectrum. Some early adopters will want full control and every cent of revenue. Most people will land somewhere in the middle, perhaps with a deal like ten thousand free miles a year in exchange for handing over the grid earnings. And at the budget end, she would not be surprised to see offers along the lines of a free car, as long as you always plug it in. Never underestimate the power of free.
The timing is closer than many assume. Carmakers are launching real V2G offers now, among them Renault in France and Ford in Germany. These will be closed ecosystems at first, where a specific car works with a specific charger. Genuine plug-and-play, where any car talks to any charger, is probably five years or more away.
Why this matters to us
At PT1 we invest in technologies that upgrade the physical world, and electrification is one of our three pillars. V2G sits right where two of the largest systems we rely on, transport and energy, are merging. That merger creates hard, unglamorous problems, and hard problems are where startups win. TUAL helps fleets electrify on sites where the grid connection is too weak. Installer takes the pain out of getting chargers and other equipment into homes, which today is one of the most complicated parts of domestic V2G. And our investment in Terra One reflects a thesis we formed back in 2022: a renewable grid needs storage, and some of that storage will have wheels. The car's first job will always be to move us. Its second job is only just beginning.
Read the full transcript of the live recording of the conversation at The Drop 2026 here.