Chinese automaker Chery has switched on what it calls the industry's first large-scale vehicle-to-grid (V2G) charging station in Wuhu, Anhui province, turning the idea of 'charge at off-peak, sell at peak' into a commercial reality. The station, operated with State Grid Anhui's Mingsheng Group, opened four days before Chery's annual innovation conference on October 20, according to Chinese outlet D1EV.
V2G technology lets parked electric vehicles feed battery power back into the grid, letting owners profit from the price difference between cheap overnight electricity and expensive daytime power. While the concept has been around for years, high equipment costs, battery health worries and a lack of grid-side coordination have kept it in pilot mode. Chery says it has addressed those hurdles with a combination of hardware, software and business design.
How owners earn
Using the upcoming Fengyun A9 sedan as an example, Chery calculates that a 70 kWh battery discharging 40 kWh a day for 200 days a year could generate about 5,600 yuan (about $790) in theoretical price-gap income. After service fees and commissions, the owner would pocket roughly 3,000 yuan (about $420) or more, with extra local V2G subsidies potentially boosting that figure. The company says its app and cloud dispatch system handle scheduling automatically, so daily driving is unaffected and earnings arrive without manual intervention.
Chery is the first automaker to offer both single-home and aggregated V2G grid connection, it says. The system limits battery charge and discharge to a 20-80% state of charge, a range that Chinese Academy of Sciences academician Ouyang Minggao says can protect rather than degrade batteries when managed properly. Chery's 'Rhino' battery retains over 80% capacity after 5,000 full cycles, far exceeding the typical 2,000-3,000 cycles of a private car, leaving ample margin for V2G use.
Scaling up
The Wuhu station is just the start. Chery plans to add 'second-charge plus V2G' sites in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hefei and Wuhu, launch V2G on the Fengyun A9 BEV (battery-electric) in the first half of 2027, and build more than 20,000 V2G-standard charging stations globally by 2029. The company also aims for a 'ten cities, hundred stations' rollout.
To make V2G cost-effective at scale, Chery is deploying a range of charging hardware. Its Xunlong 'second-charge' ultra-fast chargers deliver up to 1,440 kW, adding 500 km of range in five minutes, while robotic arms plug in with 0.1 mm precision in under 30 seconds. A rail-mounted sliding charger lets one 200 kW unit serve 16 to 80 parking spaces, cutting installation time to three days versus the usual ten. At home, the 'Energy Cube 2.0' integrates solar, storage, inverter and bidirectional charging.
Chery says its AC V2G reuses the car's onboard charger via Bluetooth, avoiding costly hardware retrofits, while DC V2G uses silicon carbide components with 96.5% efficiency. The system also supports European standards with 7 kW/11 kW DC V2G and black-start capability for home backup power.
The company's energy cloud platform aggregates vehicles, chargers, storage and solar into a virtual power plant, with a dispatch scheme for a million charging piles. According to State Grid estimates, if 10% of China's new-energy vehicles join V2G by 2030, they could provide 86 GW of regulation capacity, more than all pumped-hydro storage combined. Chery's stations aim to make that scenario a replicable reality.
