Potential Benefits of Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) to Decarbonization Pathways toward Carbon Neutrality

Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) is supposed as one of the most promising technologies to cope with the large-scale energy storage needs of the deeply decarbonized energy system toward carbon neutrality target. The existing work of decarbonization pathway designing usually models electric vehicles (EVs) as the energy consumption sector, and thus underestimates the economic and climate benefits of transportation electrification. Therefore, this work evaluates the potential of V2G including cost and carbon emission reduction through a comprehensive investment and operational model. The influence of V2G is revealed on different power system sectors including generation, transmission, storage and demand. The carbon emission of newly installed capacity and carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) are taken into account. Results show that V2G could profoundly reduce the unit decarbonization cost compared with the disorderly charging mode, through declining energy storage requirement, renewable curtailment, and thermal power reserve. Results also indicate that V2G could expand the reduction of the unit decarbonization cost by 29.6% in the high carbon tax scenario, indicating that V2G will play a greater role under more radical carbon emission reduction and renewable consumption policies.