In the popular imagination, the car is a symbol of unfettered freedom, conjuring up images of rugged individualism, heeding the call of the open road, and driving off into the sunset.

In the green imagination, the car is a symbol of environmental ills: generator of carbon emissions, belcher of unhealthy air pollution, enabler of sprawl.

But all that applies to internal combustion engine vehicles, the old cars. The new cars—electric vehicles (EVs)—are poised to shift these narratives by becoming so much more than cars.

In the future, cars won’t just get people to and from work and the grocery store. They’ll help keep the lights on at the office and ensure that the grocery store’s freezer cases are cooled by clean, renewable energy. They’ll do that by being part of “virtual power plants,” collections of many small, scattered energy resources that are already helping to stabilize and decarbonize the electric grid.

This vision hinges on the fact that EVs are essentially very large batteries on wheels, with the ability to draw, store, and (eventually) even provide power back to the grid at strategic times. Viewed through this lens, qualities that once looked like the downsides of cars become their superpowers. Take the fact that private cars are parked on the street, in lots, and in driveways for about 95% of the time. In a fossil fuel world, a car that is in motion only an hour or two a day is a massive underutilization of infrastructure. But in a renewable energy world, millions of parked EV batteries could replace costly fossil fuel “peaker” plants that are built to satisfy peak energy demand and therefore, by definition, are rarely turned on.

In other words, one form of often-idle infrastructure could be leveraged to stave off the need to build another—transforming the wider power system in the process.

Conventional power systems are built on scale and centralization. Large plants produce electricity in bulk; grid operators balance supply and demand by adjusting output at these facilities. The logic is simple—and carbon-intensive: when demand rises, burn more fuel.

Virtual power plants turn this logic on its head. A virtual power plant (VPP) is not a power station in the conventional sense. It has no boilers or cooling towers, and no single point on a map. Instead, it is a system for coordinating thousands of solar panels on rooftops, batteries in basements, electric cars in driveways, and flexible demand in homes and factories—so that, together, they behave like a single, reliable generator.

Rather than adjusting supply to respond to demand, VPPs adjust demand to respond to supply. Software platforms monitor thousands of connected devices in real time, nudging them to consume more power when electricity is plentiful and cheap, and less when the grid is strained. A battery might discharge for a few minutes; an air conditioner might pause briefly; an electric car might delay charging until later in the night.

This idea dovetails naturally with a decarbonized grid. Wind and solar power are clean but variable, producing energy according to natural timetables rather than the whims of modern society. Instead of compensating for this mismatch with gas-fired peaker plants, VPPs use flexibility as a substitute for fossil fuel.

The VPP concept isn’t new. It goes back nearly two decades, but the arrangements have proliferated rapidly in recent years.

Home batteries and smart appliances have become cheaper and more common. Digital control systems are more capable, and electricity markets are slowly learning how to reward responsiveness rather than just raw output. But a decisive change is happening on the roads.

Global EV sales grew by 20% in 2024 and again in 2025. Although demand is expected to weaken in 2026 in some regions—especially in the United States, due to the Trump administration’s rollback of climate policies—EVs are now arriving in sufficient numbers to matter to the grid.  More than 2 million new EVs hit the road in December 2025 alone.

Unmanaged, this EV boom could be a massive strain on the electric grid. That’s partly because charging EVs sucks up so much energy: an all-EV fleet could increase peak power demand by 50%, according to one study. It’s partly because their demand is so intense: plug an EV into a Level 2 home charger, and it instantly draws as much power as two or even three typical households­—a load that neighborhood transformers weren’t designed to deal with.

But that’s exactly why EVs are such a crucial piece of the puzzle, says Nicola Salzman, a senior product manager with WeaveGrid, an EV smart charging startup: “We view EVs as perhaps the most critical device class to VPPs.”

Smart charging seeks to shift the time when people charge their EVs, to smooth out peaks in demand and take advantage of the availability of cheap, renewable power—for example, by delaying charging for a few hours after they return from work in the evening. But as a critical mass of EVs hits the road, this strategy just shifts the problem.

WeaveGrid is taking smart charging to the next level with software to coordinate and manage EV charging at the neighborhood transformer scale. Toggling electricity flow to different chargers on and off to modulate power demand on a moment-by-moment basis, the setup in effect creates an EV-specific VPP. The company currently manages roughly 250 megawatts of power demand nationwide, about one-quarter of a peaker plant’s worth.

The goal of all that back and forth, and for VPPs in general, is a seamless experience for participants. “We want to make it so that they don’t have to think about it at all,” says Kendall Cody, WeaveGrid’s marketing and communications director. “And it’s just like: your car will be ready in the morning.”

But the real potential of EVs lies with the next step in the evolution of VPPs: not just managing demand but also leveraging distributed energy resources to increase the total power available supply. This is where EVs’ big and ubiquitous batteries could play a starring role by storing renewable electricity and feeding it back to the grid at strategic times, an arrangement known as vehicle-to-grid or V2G.

A growing body of research suggests that within a decade or two, EV batteries could single-handedly stabilize a solar- and wind-based electric grid. This would likely involve both V2G and reuse of old EV batteries in stationary storage banks. In a 2024 analysis, V2G emerged as the bigger player of the two because it can happen sooner, before enough retired EV batteries become available to build storage systems at scale.

The implications go even further. In one study, V2G didn’t just stabilize the grid—it could actually help clean it up, flipping EV charging into a net climate benefit. By shifting charging to moments when renewable energy is abundant, V2G increases demand precisely when solar and wind power might otherwise be wasted. That, in turn, makes renewable projects more profitable and nudges the entire grid toward cleaner energy.

In this analysis, “smart charging helped a bit, but not a whole lot” in terms of encouraging renewables development, says study team member Parth Vaishnav, an engineer researching decarbonization strategies at the University of Michigan. “But the ability to use the vehicles as temporary storage for electricity set up all kinds of changes in the economics that produced a really big difference.”

For now, though, most of V2G’s benefits live on paper. Many EVs aren’t equipped to send power back to the grid, and adding bidirectional charging hardware can be costly. Drivers may worry about something more basic: whether their car will still be ready when they need it. There’s also the question of battery health. “The more we use the batteries, the more they degrade,” says Stavros Orfanoudakis, a graduate student at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Extra charge-and-discharge cycles can shorten battery life—and in some cases, even jeopardize warranties.

That’s why the first real proving grounds for V2G may not be individual households, but shared fleets. Car-sharing companies, says Fernando Aguilar Lopez, CEO of the Guatemalan renewable energy firm Siempre Energy and a coauthor of the 2024 study, are uniquely positioned to move early. Their fleets are large, standardized, and centrally managed, making it easier to balance grid needs, mobility, and battery wear. That future is already taking shape: in March 2025, a Dutch car-sharing service launched a V2G project in Utrecht, connecting 60 bidirectional chargers to the city’s grid—an early glimpse of what a more flexible, electrified energy system might look like.

For individual EV owners, a more feasible next step could be vehicle-to-home (V2H) charging. In this scheme, EV batteries are charged when cheap renewable power is abundant, and they feed electricity back to the home to power household appliances at other times. “Effectively you are using the vehicle’s battery to pre-purchase electricity for other uses,” Vaishnav explains.

Like V2G, V2H requires bidirectional charging capability and increases battery cycling. But it offers simpler logistics, because the EV doesn’t have to be integrated with the wider electric grid. And it may be an easier psychological lift for EV owners, Lopez says, because “that’s somewhere where people can see the value of utilizing their battery directly.” V2H could also help households integrate rooftop solar panels, he says.

In fact, V2H benefits for EV owners could be huge, according to a US-based analysis by Vaishnav and his colleagues. Their modeling suggests that V2H charging could save owners $2,400 to $5,600 in charging costs over the lifetime of the vehicle, or 40-90% of the total cost of charging. In some parts of Texas and California, the cost savings can even be greater than the cost of charging the vehicle, so owning an EV would reduce the household’s total electric bill.

Meanwhile, the arrangement shrinks the carbon footprint of a household’s electricity use by 70-250%, the researchers found.

EV batteries could also provide a source of backup power making homes more resilient to power cuts—which are likely to become more frequent as climate change intensifies, more household functions go electric, and the grid incorporates more sources of variable power. In fact, a California state law enacted in 2024 authorizes the state’s energy commission to require all EVs sold in the state to be equipped with bidirectional charging capability. The motivation, in part, is to make this form of climate adaptation available to more households who may be able to afford an EV but not dedicated battery storage.

Dirk Lauinger, a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Lopez’s coauthor, predicts that household resilience will be a “segue” for making bidirectional charging more widely available. “And then, once we do have this capability, I think [EVs] will be able to balance the grid at large scale,” he says.

Overall, Lauinger says, “EVs can provide a ton of flexibility,” both to the grid and to individual drivers. In a renewable energy world, flexibility sounds a lot like freedom. In other words, EVs will continue to represent the same benefits that the popular imagination has long associated with cars—just not necessarily limited to the open road.

Sarah DeWeerdt is a freelance journalist in Seattle covering biology, medicine, and the environment. Her work has appeared in bioGraphic, Nautilus, and Nature. She also writes about the intersection of climate change, human behavior, and the built environment for Anthropocene’s Daily Science blog.

Top image: ©Anthropocene Magazine