Raffeiner Says Europe's Spare Grid Is Parked in Driveways

Thomas Raffeiner, founder and CEO of The Mobility House, argues that the batteries in millions of electric cars already on Europe's roads are a large part of the answer to the continent's drought-hit, price-volatile and import-dependent power system.

Europe spent the past few years discovering how many different ways an electricity system can be squeezed. Drought thins out hydropower and, in some countries, the cooling water that thermal and nuclear plants depend on. Wholesale prices swing hard from hour to hour as weather-driven wind and solar output rises and falls. And the fuels that fill the gaps still arrive, in large part, from places whose politics Europe does not control.

Thomas Raffeiner, founder and chief executive of The Mobility House, makes a straightforward argument in response: a substantial share of the flexible storage Europe needs has already been bought and paid for, and it is sitting in garages and car parks. It is the battery pack in each of the millions of electric vehicles now on European roads. His case, set out via electrive, is that the energy transition's missing piece is less a construction problem than a coordination problem.

Why a parked car is a grid asset

The logic rests on a mundane fact about car ownership: vehicles spend most of their lives stationary. A pack that is only occasionally called on to move a car is, for the rest of the time, idle chemical storage connected to a building that is connected to a grid.

Two levels of sophistication follow from that. The simpler one is smart charging — shifting when a car draws power so it fills up when wind and solar output is high and wholesale prices are low, and stops when the system is tight. This requires no new hardware in the car, only a controllable charger and a signal worth responding to.

The more ambitious one is bidirectional charging, in which power flows back out of the pack. Vehicle-to-home discharges into the building behind the meter, covering evening peaks or riding through an outage. Vehicle-to-grid exports to the network itself, letting an aggregated fleet behave like a distributed power plant that can absorb surplus generation and release it when demand spikes. Because it is the sum of many small assets rather than one large one, it can be dispatched in fine slices — which is precisely the shape of the flexibility a weather-driven grid keeps asking for.

The obstacles are contractual as much as technical

The hardware side of this has been demonstrated repeatedly. The harder part is everything wrapped around it.

• Metering and market access. Selling electricity back into a wholesale or balancing market generally requires the asset to be metered, registered and, in most markets, represented by a licensed party. A car that moves between a home, an office and a motorway charger complicates all three.
• Double taxation and network charges. In several European jurisdictions, power imported into a battery and later exported can be hit with levies at both ends, which quietly erases the arbitrage that makes the whole exercise worth doing.
• Warranty and battery degradation. Owners will want assurance that cycling a pack for grid services does not void coverage or shorten useful life. Manufacturer policy, not physics, tends to be the binding constraint.
• Interoperability. Chargers, vehicles, home energy managers and utility platforms have to speak compatible protocols. Where they do not, the flexibility exists on paper and nowhere else.
• Consumer trust. Drivers need to know that a car enrolled in a grid programme will still have the range they expect the next morning. Guaranteed minimum state-of-charge is a product feature, not an engineering detail.

None of these are insurmountable. All of them require regulators, network operators, carmakers and aggregators to move in the same direction at roughly the same time — which is a slower business than installing a charger.

What it would mean for the metals side of the chain

If parked EVs become a recognised grid resource, the economics of a battery pack change. It stops being purely a cost of mobility and starts carrying a second revenue line, which strengthens the case for buying the vehicle in the first place and, at the margin, for specifying a larger pack.

That has consequences upstream. Sustained demand for lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese and graphite has always been tied to how many EVs get sold and how big their batteries are. A credible V2G market pushes gently on both variables. It also cuts the other way for stationary storage suppliers, since every kilowatt-hour of flexibility harvested from a car is a kilowatt-hour of grid-scale battery that a utility may not need to procure — though most system studies treat the two as complements rather than substitutes, given how differently they behave.

There is a geopolitical dimension too, and it is the one Raffeiner's framing leans on hardest. Flexibility sourced from vehicles already inside Europe displaces marginal generation that often runs on imported fuel. It does not solve the continent's dependence on imported battery raw materials, but it changes which import matters and when.

What to watch from here

The signposts are regulatory rather than technological. Watch for member states removing double charging on stored-and-re-exported electricity, for network codes that let aggregated vehicle fleets bid into balancing markets on the same terms as batteries, and for carmakers writing bidirectional capability and warranty cover into standard specifications rather than pilot programmes.

Broader markets, meanwhile, are in no particular hurry. The S&P 500, as tracked by SPY, stood at $767.02 late in the session on 31 August 2026, down 0.30% on the day from a previous close of $769.35, with a day range of $764.72 to $768.00. Energy-transition infrastructure arguments tend to be decided over policy cycles, not trading sessions — and the fleet Raffeiner is describing grows every time someone buys an electric car for reasons that have nothing to do with the grid.

Key facts

• Who: Thomas Raffeiner, founder & CEO of The Mobility House
• Core argument: Batteries in millions of Europe's electric cars are a key part of the energy transition solution
• Pressures cited: Drought, volatile electricity prices, geopolitical dependencies
• Market backdrop: S&P 500 (SPY) $767.02, -0.30%, as of 20:00 GMT, 31 Aug 2026

Frequently asked questions

What is vehicle-to-grid charging?

Vehicle-to-grid, or V2G, is bidirectional charging in which an electric car's battery not only draws power but sends it back to the electricity network. Aggregated across many vehicles, it lets a fleet act like a distributed power plant, absorbing surplus renewable generation when it is plentiful and releasing stored energy when demand or prices spike.

What is Thomas Raffeiner arguing?

Raffeiner, founder and chief executive of The Mobility House, argues that a significant part of the answer to Europe's energy vulnerability already exists in the batteries of the millions of electric cars on its roads. He points to drought, volatile electricity prices and geopolitical dependencies as evidence of how exposed the continent's power supply currently is.

Why is drought a problem for Europe's electricity supply?

Low water levels reduce hydropower output and can also limit the cooling water that thermal and nuclear generation depends on. When that capacity is constrained, systems lean harder on other sources, which can push wholesale prices up and increase reliance on imported fuels — one of the pressures cited in the argument for using EV batteries as flexible storage.

What stops V2G from scaling today?

The barriers are largely regulatory and contractual rather than technical. They include metering and market-registration rules, network charges or taxes applied to both imported and re-exported electricity, manufacturer warranty terms covering battery cycling, protocol interoperability between cars and chargers, and consumer confidence that a vehicle will still be charged when needed.

How could V2G affect battery metals demand?

If a car battery earns revenue from grid services as well as providing transport, the economics of buying an EV and specifying a larger pack improve at the margin. That would support demand for lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese and graphite, though the precise effect depends on how quickly regulators open market access to vehicle fleets.

Is V2G a substitute for grid-scale batteries?

Mostly they are treated as complements. Grid-scale storage is fixed, always available and dispatched centrally, while vehicle batteries are mobile, intermittently connected and controlled by drivers. Flexibility harvested from cars can reduce how much stationary storage a utility must procure, but it does not replicate the same reliability profile.

Sources

• The solution for the energy transition has long been sitting in our garages — electrive

Photo: smart-me AG · Pexels Licence — source