GWANGJU, South Korea – Researchers at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) have developed a groundbreaking "Robust Virtual Battery" (VB) model, a technology designed to aggregate thousands of electric vehicles (EVs) into a single, reliable energy resource. This innovation is expected to significantly accelerate the commercialization of Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) technology.
The research team, led by Professor Yun-su Kim from the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, announced on March 24, 2026, that they have successfully created a mathematical framework that treats a massive fleet of EVs as a single integrated battery. This allows for seamless participation in both day-ahead and real-time electricity markets.
While EVs have long been eyed as "mobile power plants" or Distributed Energy Resources (DER), managing them has been notoriously difficult. Unlike stationary batteries, EVs move frequently, and each vehicle has different battery capacities and states of charge. Previous models often suffered from "disaggregation errors"—where the overall power plan failed to translate accurately into the charging/discharging of individual vehicles—and raised privacy concerns due to the extensive data collection required.
To overcome these hurdles, the GIST team’s "Robust Virtual Battery" model calculates the collective power storage and supply capacity of an entire EV fleet at once, without needing to process every individual vehicle's complex internal data. By requiring only minimal information—such as target charge levels and connection times—the model ensures both efficiency and privacy.
The team's eight-month simulation involving 5,000 EVs demonstrated that this new approach could reduce operational costs by 8.8% to 14.9% compared to existing methods. The model proved to be highly scalable, maintaining fast computational speeds even with large-scale fleets, and showed near-zero error between the power market plan and actual vehicle execution.
"We have established a foundation for utilizing large-scale EVs as a highly reliable power resource," said Professor Kim. "By minimizing the gap between market planning and real-world operation, this technology will not only hasten V2G commercialization but also enhance the flexibility and stability of the national power grid."
The study, which promises to transform how we view electric mobility and energy management, marks a major step forward in the transition toward a sustainable, smart-grid-based future.
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