Nor should they. People don't want to be cycling their batteries and reducing their life. This use case would be better served by batteries that are designed for that purpose instead of being designed to be light for a vehicle.
More battery cycles just costs money. For the right price, I'd do it.
But more than that: I don't want to be stranded without power in my vehicle because someone in the electric grid made poor power management decisions and decided to offload that decision to consumers.
That said, most EV incentive programs use around 10% (often less) of an EV battery capacity so the actual effects are barely noticeable.
A price that can be measured in money. How much more does it need to pay to be worth any extra hassle?
So in a sense it is just money. Money is hassle, fundamentally. It's a hassle to make it and you spend it to save other hassles.
Another factor is that not all charge/discharge cycles are the same. Going between 60% and 80% five times is a lot lighter on the battery than going between 0% and 100% once. Which pairs great with EV batteries, because their batteries are deliberately oversized compared to average use to account for uncommon events.
This is how most Time-of-Use metering already works. The driver sets a minimum battery percentage to charge immediately (eg 40% range, enough to reach the local hospital), and then schedule a time when the car should be fully charged (eg 80% by 7AM). The software just Does The Right Thing, using the same prediction and bidding algorithms as stationary batteries.
The search term is "V1G" (a cheeky reference to unidirectional V2G).
How is power discarded? I would expect peaking generation to be cut back or perhaps even base load plants can reduce output. (AFAIK "base load" means they are expected to be kept operating continuously whereas "peaking" is designed to start up when needed and shut down when not.)
It isn’t, not at scale in any traditional sense.
As for baseload. It's one of those waffly terms that's rarely specified in GW that is needed. Which as it turns out is far less than we used to have given that much of it was replaced with wind and solar over the last decade or so. The real question is how low can we go with this stuff before we need some more solutions. Some would say all the way but the consensus is that the last 5-10% might get very hard and costly.
Either way, having some peaker plants on stand by ready to spin up over the course of hours/days while batteries slowly deplete is probably a good short term compromise. Replacing spinning mass (fly wheels) with batteries seems a particularly popular and very cost effective use for batteries.
... and a serious issue should one of the few large manufacturers or remote-control dispatcher/trader companies get hacked. The outage in Spain a few weeks ago was just a small warning, probably caused by a technical malfunction. But now imagine this being used as a side track in an act of war? The first day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine was accompanied by the hack of Viasat satellites, which led to 5.800 wind turbines shutting down due to a lack of remote control capabilities [1]. Now imagine the large Chinese inverter and power bank controller vendors that often enough just white-label for other brands? That's a whole lot of a different game now.
If everyone agrees, you can use grid frequency/phase to coordinate, and not a separate realtime communication system. Grid interactive demand/response is a proven way to manage supply and load.
When your section of the grid is stressed, supply power or abstain from charging; when your section of the grid is abundant, charge.
Coordination is useful too, of course; predictive charging is helpful, and you wouldn't get that only by monitoring the grid; you also want to know somehow that a supply or load is scheduled to be added or removed at time X, or was unexpectedly removed and will not be reconnected for some time. And the system operator would want to know about capacity in many dimensions.
Grid frequency cannot be used at scale to coordinate energy production as a result, because the grid elements themselves don't know why the frequency is going down on its own or where the cause is. For that you need to monitor the country or region crossing to see where energy is flowing and aggregate this.
Drop a couple gigawatts from the production side, for example, all at once and the frequency will immediately drop, only not crashing due to the mechanical inertia of the large power plants. Immediately, electricity and physics will lead to current balances redistributing and automated systems will kick in (e.g. gas peaker plants ramp up in a matter of seconds, battery storage kicks in even faster). But when too much capacity gets dropped, the available spare capacity isn't enough and eventually the first lines will trip due to overcurrent or frequency deviation. That is what happened in Spain, made worse by the fact that inverters don't have mechanical inertia and so immediately more inverters dropped out for safety reasons as the frequency sagged too much for their protection circuits. The inverse, adding a couple of gigawatts of consumers, causes the same effect.
That's also why very large consumers such as smelters must contact the local electricity distributor in advance before any load change - dispatch must know precisely when the consumer will drop or add load, so that other plants can be regulated up or down to avoid too much of a sag or hike in frequency.
There's a separate Scandinavian grid for East Denmark (Zealand) and north.
(And the British Isles are their own grid.)
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verband_Europ%C3%A4ischer_%C3%...
[2] https://www.entsoe.eu/news/2025/02/09/entso-e-confirms-succe...
The lesson here is that distributed power is a good thing in war time scenarios but you might want to pay attention to digital security. Central power generation becomes a tempting target.
Now the good news with Chinese stuff is that a war is not imminent and we have the benefit of hindsight and can do something about that.
We are and we have been at war with China (and Russia and North Korea, fwiw) for many years at this point. The ongoing cyberwarfare from either country is more than enough to warrant this label, the problem is we were and are governed by chickens who refuse to accept the reality we are living in and still think that kowtowing to China's every demand will save our economies.
As with batteries, it would require some work with the utility companies, so that they can signal the best times to power on/off, and offer the appropriate financial incentives to do so. We are already doing that in some way with peak/off-peak pricing, but it doesn't help with high frequency, unplanned variations.
Another interesting aspect is that as grid demand fluctuates, a lot of cables are under utilized at least some of the time. Which means there is plenty of capacity for charging batteries provided there is excess generation and cable capacity. A lot of that power currently gets discarded instead. Batteries allow better use of this excess power. And having a lot of local battery means that cable capacity can be freed up as well when needed and then recharged when demand reduces.
And then finally battery prices are coming down. With sodium ion cell production ramping up in several places, things could get quite a bit cheaper. These don't depend on scarce metals or materials. And they last quite long as well (relative to NMC).