Full Title: Unlocking Vehicle-to-Grid Potential of Load Shifting in China’s Megacities Considering Comprehensive Real-World Behaviors
Author(s): Kaisan Li, Xinxin Li, Zuxun Xiong, Shengyu Tao, Gucheng Zhao, Yi Jiang, He Qi, and Yi Zhang
Publisher(s): Nature
Publication Date: November 18, 2025
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
Global decarbonization necessitates large-scale electrification, bringing load stability challenges to urban grids. While Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology using private plug-in electric vehicles (P-PEVs) can balance the loads, its potential at megacity-level remains unclear due to the complexity of fine-grained, user-centric modelling. Here, we propose a Mobility and V2G Coupled (MOVC) framework, which depicts individual P-PEV travel-charge behaviors and evaluates user V2G concerns regarding willingness, compensation, and battery degradation. The framework analyzes 480,000 P-PEVs in Shenzhen, China, revealing a 2300 MW peak-shaving capacity, reducing peak-valley ratios by 73%. V2G strategies that prioritize user satisfaction hardly sacrifice the load shifting performance, but reduce battery degradation costs and compensation costs by 30-40% and 5-13% respectively. A forward-looking scenario considering fully-deployed quick charging (QC) in four China’s megacities reveals 0%-12% lower peak-valley ratios with more inequal V2G scheduling (4%-95% higher standard deviation). This study enlightens megacity-level V2G potential evaluations and their policy-making considering real-world behaviors.