Electric car owners in Massachusetts, Maryland and California can get paid for sending battery power back to the grid, up to 2,750 dollars a season

Get paid for sending electric car battery power back to the grid

Electric car owners in a small number of states can now get paid for sending their car battery power back into the electric grid, a two way flow that utilities call vehicle to grid, or V2G. A parked car with the right charger does not only pull electricity in, it can also push some back out when the grid needs extra power, and the utility or state pays the owner for that service. So far, 3 states have real, dollar specific programs, Massachusetts, Maryland and California.

Massachusetts announced a rate, but has not opened it yet

National Grid, the utility that serves much of Massachusetts, has added a vehicle to grid option to its ConnectedSolutions program. The rate can reach up to 275 dollars per average kilowatt of performance over the summer, a kilowatt being a measure of how fast electricity moves. National Grid says that works out to about 1,375 to 2,750 dollars for many residential participants, depending on the charger and how well it performs. More than 150,000 electric cars are already registered in the state. As of the most recent report, enrollment had not opened yet and no date had been announced, so nobody in Massachusetts is being paid under this rate today.

We are excited to bring our dispatching expertise to Massachusetts and help expand our vehicle to grid technology to more customers.

Chip Silverman, director of grid services at Sunrun, the company helping run the dispatching for the National Grid Massachusetts rate. Source 1.

Maryland already ran a small pilot and paid drivers

Baltimore Gas and Electric, working with Sunrun and Ford, ran a residential vehicle to grid pilot with 3 homes from July through September 2025. Drivers were paid up to 1,000 dollars for the season based on how much energy they sent back during a set window each weekday evening. The pilot has ended.

Now, I can also earn money by sending energy directly to the grid.

Morgan Grove, Baltimore resident who took part in the Maryland pilot. Source 2.

California runs 2 separate state payment programs

California has 2 different state agencies paying for vehicle to grid power, and they should not be confused with each other. The California Public Utilities Commission runs the Emergency Load Reduction Program, started in 2021, which pays 2 dollars per kilowatt hour to business customers and 1 dollar per kilowatt hour to residential customers for cutting their power use during a grid emergency, including by sending a car battery power back out. A kilowatt hour is the amount of electricity used or sent over 1 hour, the unit on a home power bill.

Separately, the California Energy Commission runs its own Demand Side Grid Support program. For 2026, it set aside 250,000 dollars specifically for aggregators, companies that bundle together many bidirectional car chargers, chargers that can push power out of the car as well as pull it in, and offer their combined power to the grid as one resource, the first time this program has done so. Reading the commission own program rules shows that a group of car chargers needs only 50 kilowatts of combined power to qualify, against 300 kilowatts for a group of stationary batteries, a far lower bar to clear. The commission price table pays these car charger groups 62.10, 74.52 and 82.80 dollars per kilowatt across the season, rising with how many hours the group can keep sending power, before a 30% bonus that applies only for the 2025 and 2026 program years.

No source describes a nationwide total of electric cars enrolled or dollars paid out so far. The story for now is 3 states, each testing its own way of paying an electric car owner for power the car was already storing anyway.