A Techno-Social Approach to Unlocking Vehicle to Everything (V2X) Integration: A Real-World Demonstration

The urgent transition towards electric vehicles (EVs) may potentially result in expensive capacity upgrades for power system operators (PSOs), however, the recent uptake in bidirectional EV charging, often referred to as “Vehicle to Everything” (V2X), may defer this need while simultaneously generating revenue for participating EV owners. Yet, there is a lack of real-world investigation to elicit (a) the willingness of EV owners to participate in V2X programs (b) the alignment of these programs within existing electricity markets, and (c) how V2X may be combined with other distributed energy resources (DERs) to realize maximum energy savings. As such, this paper proposes the design and implementation of a V2X program that is informed by the socio-technical preferences of EV owners, including convenience, revenue, and emissions savings. A survey is distributed to 124 EV owners to characterize their degree of willingness to participate in the program, which leads to the design of several EV session types that enable EV owners to arbitrage at their convenience, or participate in demand response (DR) events for higher revenue. Real-world tests at residential and commercial buildings in Ontario successfully demonstrate the facilitation of both arbitrage and DR, leading to increased revenue, decreased emissions, and the ability to participate in DR with other building DERs to reduce the building load by 30 kW. The proposed work contributes a novel attempt to demonstrate pathways to realize the potential offerings of V2X programs to benefit both EV owners, building owners, and PSOs.