Vehicle-to-everything (V2X): an updated review of key research challenges, implementation barriers, and real-world innovation projects

By 2050, there will be more than 1 billion electric vehicles (EVs) on the road. This presents an opportunity for Europe to rapidly expand its share of variable renewable energy (VRE) generation, which is in line with major climate policies at European Union (EU) level. Despite that promising outlook, the rapid growth of electric mobility will pose major technical challenges and infrastructural risks to Europe’s power system. One way to address this is through widespread implementation of smart bidirectional EV charging, which can potentially provide the power system with the flexibility to accommodate higher shares of VREs. The implementation scenarios for this technology are collectively known as vehicle-to-everything, or V2X, including vehicle-to grid (V2G), vehicle-to-home (V2H), and vehicle-to-building (V2B). This paper summarizes recent developments in the V2X arena, doing it in three stages. Firstly, it focuses on taxonomy aspects, performing a bibliometric analysis and studying technical term conventions. Secondly, it compiles relevant barriers to implementation and maps key issues addressed in scientific literature. And thirdly, it surveys past and existing projects to retrieve updated insights on its technical and market orientations. This review is produced as part of the EU-funded DriVe2X project, which develops new expert knowledge and technical solutions to help cope with the forthcoming mass EV deployment in Europe.