Search for vehicle-to-grid revenue and you will find a lot of pro formas and very few actual payments. That gap matters if you are a property owner or fleet operator being pitched V2G as a way to offset the cost of a commercial charging install. As of August 2026, one utility in the country runs a program that pays a commercial customer a set rate per kilowatt-hour for power sent back through the grid: the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Everything else that gets called V2G revenue in the US right now is either a narrower form of demand response, a utility-funded pilot where the utility keeps the value, or a demonstration with no live tariff behind it at all.
This is the answer to the question this article is here to answer: what pays today, what is close, and what is still marketing.
The one program that actually pays a $/kWh V2G rate
LADWP's Commercial Energy Storage to Grid pilot, known as CES2G, is the closest thing in the country to a straightforward answer to "can I get paid for exporting power." LADWP describes it as the nation's first municipal-utility V2G and storage-to-grid program, launched in June 2023, and it is still running. The mechanics as LADWP publishes them: the utility makes 20 megawatts of capacity available through separately metered systems, and eligible commercial, industrial, and institutional customers, including fleets of electric buses and trucks charging through high-voltage DC fast chargers, get paid roughly $0.17 per kWh above the prevailing peak rate for energy they discharge back into the grid during critical peak periods, with a guaranteed minimum of 50 discharge events a year. LADWP also reimburses interconnection costs. LADWP has periodically reopened CES2G to allocate unused capacity from earlier tranches, most recently in 2026; confirm the current application window directly on the CES2G program page before you plan a submission date around it.
That is a real, named, dated tariff with a rate you can put in a spreadsheet. It is also narrow. It only applies inside LADWP's territory, which is the city of Los Angeles, not the broader Los Angeles County service area covered by Southern California Edison. It requires DC fast charging infrastructure and separately metered interconnection, which is a real capital outlay before the first discharge event pays anything. And 20 MW across the whole program is a small allocation; a handful of large fleet participants could fill it.
The bigger revenue path right now is demand response, not export
The more common way a commercial fleet earns money from a bidirectional charger today is not selling energy to the grid at all. It is getting paid to reduce load during a declared event, using the vehicle battery instead of drawing from the meter. PG&E runs this through its Emergency Load Reduction Program (ELRP), which pays enrolled customers for verified load reduction during grid emergencies called through OpenADR signals. Two California school districts are now doing this with buses instead of stationary batteries. Oakland Unified School District, working with bus operator Zum, was the first, starting in 2024. Fremont Unified School District followed in 2025, commissioning six bidirectional DC fast chargers alongside its existing lower-power charging to support 14 electric school buses, with software from The Mobility House responding to ELRP signals on the district's behalf.
Functionally, this earns real money for real grid events using real bidirectional hardware, which puts it a step ahead of a lab demo. But it is a demand-response payment for reducing consumption during a handful of declared emergencies a year, not a standing per-kWh export rate, and it is currently structured around school bus fleets whose predictable, mostly-parked schedule fits the program well. PG&E describes both districts' participation as part of a commercial fleet vehicle-to-everything pilot, its own word for it, not a general-availability tariff open to any commercial charging site.
The pattern to watch for: who actually gets paid
The most common V2G announcement you will read is neither of the above. It is a utility-funded buildout where the utility, not the property owner or fleet operator, captures the grid value. Dominion Energy's Virginia program is the clearest example. Phase one, a roughly $16 million buildout, connected 50 electric school buses across 16 districts with V2G-capable chargers, with Dominion paying for the buses, the chargers, the networking, and the installation, and schools charging at their normal utility rate except during declared V2G events. Dominion's broader electric-school-bus initiative has grown well past that first phase since, toward a stated goal of 1,000-plus buses, though not every later bus is necessarily V2G-equipped. In the V2G phase, the districts got electric buses at close to diesel-bus cost and avoided most of the capital outlay. What they did not get is a per-kWh check for grid services; that value flows to Dominion, which uses the bus batteries as a dispatchable grid resource it owns the economics of.
ComEd's pilot in northern Illinois, run with Nuvve's Fermata Energy and Resource Innovations, sits a step earlier still. As of this writing it covers four electric school buses across three districts (River Trails, Troy, and Wauconda), explicitly framed as a testing phase to validate the technology before any wider rollout. ComEd's most recent beneficial-electrification plan funds V2G research through 2028, which tells you the utility itself is treating this as multi-year R&D, not a program ready to write a commercial fleet a check next quarter.
None of this makes these programs worthless to a property owner. If a utility is willing to fund your hardware in exchange for dispatch rights, that is a real subsidy, and it is worth asking your utility whether a similar deal exists. It is a different question from "will V2G pay for itself," which is the question most vendor pitches are actually answering with unverified numbers.
Why the interconnection rules are still the bottleneck
The reason V2G revenue is concentrated in a few named programs instead of a general market is regulatory, not technical. In California, which has more V2G activity than any other state, direct-current bidirectional EV charging equipment can interconnect under the existing Rule 21 tariff, the same framework that governs solar and battery storage interconnection, per a 2020 CPUC decision. But the California Public Utilities Commission opened a new rulemaking in August 2025 specifically to modernize Rule 21's interconnection procedures for distributed energy resources, including battery storage and EVs, with initial comments due in October 2025 and a prehearing conference in December 2025. That process was still open as of this writing, which means the interconnection rules a V2G project has to satisfy in California are themselves in flux.
On the hardware and communications side, most bidirectional systems running today use proprietary protocols between a specific charger and a specific utility's software, not an open standard. ISO 15118-20, the standard that would let bidirectional charging equipment from different vendors talk to different utilities' systems the same way, is only beginning to appear in commercial NACS-based hardware in 2026. Until that standardization matures, expect V2G programs to keep looking like the ones above: utility-specific, hardware-specific, and enrollment-limited, rather than a rate any commercial charging site can sign up for the way a demand-response program is often built to scale.
What to do with this if you are evaluating a commercial site
- Check whether you are inside LADWP territory before you plan around CES2G. It is the one live per-kWh V2G tariff in the country right now, and it does not extend past LA's municipal service area.
- Ask your utility about demand-response programs before you ask about V2G specifically. PG&E's ELRP shows that the near-term money is more often in load reduction than in export, and your utility may run something similar without branding it V2G.
- If a vendor cites a utility-funded pilot as evidence of V2G revenue, check who is actually getting paid. Dominion's and ComEd's programs are genuine and well-documented, but in both, the utility captures most or all of the grid-services value in exchange for funding the hardware.
- Do not build a bidirectional charging investment case on a per-kWh V2G rate that does not exist yet in your territory. Verify directly with your utility's commercial programs team whether an interconnection pathway and a compensation rate for V2G actually exist today, not whether one is planned.
- Weigh V2G potential as a bonus on top of a charging investment that already pencils on its own, not as the thing that makes the investment work. Our fleet electrification ROI piece and our piece on how to read commercial charging utilization data both make the same point from a different angle: treat vendor figures for revenue you have not verified against a named, dated program as marketing, not a line item.
Truck-side megawatt charging has already had its own real-versus-hype moment in 2026, with a Scania demonstration sending 750 kW back to the grid over the new MCS connector in May, a proof point rather than a product; see our piece on megawatt truck charging for that story. Residential V2H, the home version of bidirectional charging, has moved further into real products than commercial V2G has; see what V2H, V2G, and V2L actually mean for homeowners for that comparison. On the commercial side, as of August 2026: one named tariff, one demand-response program running on two school bus fleets, and two utility-funded pilots. Everything else is a plan for later.
Last factually verified: 2026-08-28 against LADWP's CES2G program pages and the CES2G Guidelines document (Commercial Energy Storage to Grid Pilot Program), corroborated by GoElectricDrive's summary of the Distribution Voltage Energy Storage Supply Service rate agreement; PG&E and The Mobility House's August 2025 announcement of the Fremont Unified School District vehicle-to-grid school bus commissioning, corroborated by T&D World and The Mobility House's own newsroom; Dominion Energy's Virginia electric school bus V2G program, corroborated by PJM Inside Lines and Trellis; the Nuvve, ComEd, and Resource Innovations Illinois V2G pilot announcement (February 2025), corroborated by Electrek and School Bus Fleet; and the CPUC's August 2025 order instituting rulemaking to modernize Rule 21 interconnection procedures. evcharginghelp.com is editorially independent and receives no compensation from any company or utility named here.