Consider the various participants in a potential vehicle-to-grid, or V2G market. Utilities are generally in favour of technologies that help them avoid blackouts, but cars aren’t a great substitute for dedicated, grid-connected batteries. Trying to predict the behaviour of owners — whether they’re home, whether they’ve plugged their car in, and whether they’ve set discharging limits so that they’ve got enough juice for a long intercity journey tomorrow — adds a whole new layer of complexity to the picture. As a result, they’re unlikely to pay as much for V2G electricity as they’d give to a standalone battery farm.

Carmakers are similarly reluctant. With the EV market still in its infancy, battery degradation is a worry to many buyers. Automakers are assuaging those fears with warranties that typically run for eight to 10 years, but a battery that is recharging and discharging every day to power the grid will probably run down faster than one in more normal usage. In that situation, the owner’s V2G profit becomes the carmaker’s warranty liability — an alarming prospect given all the money manufacturers are already spending on the switch to electric.

Some car companies have embraced a related way of using your battery — vehicle-to-home or V2H discharging, which powers just your own appliances, and causes less wear of your power cells. The shift has been halting and piecemeal, nonetheless: General Motors is in the process of rolling it out, but Ford will only do it with dedicated, and costly, charging stations. Meanwhile, Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has been a notable sceptic, though the company is reportedly planning to introduce the technology next year.

Even individuals seem lukewarm on the idea. Cars are idle 95 per cent of the time. Using them as batteries when they’re parked seems the perfect way of paying off that car loan — but the relatively modest uptake of things like car-sharing and widespread indifference to depreciation costs suggests that owners aren’t all that interested in maximising the returns on their investments.

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A really valuable payment from the grid for a limited discharge that doesn’t mess with your daily commute would be the perfect thing to whet the public’s appetite. That sort of generous payment with robust consumer guardrails, however, is likely to prove less attractive to utilities. They’d rather deal with a dedicated battery farm than count on an unruly flock of householders being plugged in at the right time.

All of this represents a tragic failure to exploit the clean-energy assets we have in an efficient way. While the world as a whole would benefit greatly from a wide-scale shift to V2G, most players would see only marginal advantages, or even disadvantages. If governments don’t intervene to break this deadlock, the current wasteful stagnation will persist.

David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change and energy. Previously, he worked for Bloomberg News, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.

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