On 20 October the 2026 Chery Global Innovation Conference opened in Wuhu. Under the theme Change, the company did not point its cameras at a new model or a specification sheet. It laid out four freedoms: mobility, energy, food and life.
Chairman Yin Tongyue was direct about the reasoning. The core value of technological evolution is not showing off parameters, he said, but landing in real scenarios, solving user pain points and creating the greatest value for human freedom.
In Chery’s definition, energy freedom means letting every kilowatt hour of green power flow freely. What supports it is vehicle-to-grid technology, which lets a car interact with the grid in both directions while parked, turning the onboard battery into a storage asset that can flow, be traded and generate income.
The site opened before the keynote
Four days before the conference, Chery Green Energy and State Grid Anhui Electric Power’s Mingsheng Group opened the industry’s first large-scale vehicle-to-grid operating site in Wuhu. Charging at the trough and selling at the peak moved from a technical proposition to a business with a calculable return.
V2G is not a new concept. The idea of sending power back from a parked electric vehicle, letting owners capture the spread while the grid shaves peaks and fills troughs, has been around for years while staying at the pilot and validation stage. Direct current equipment costs are high, retrofit thresholds are hard to clear, owners worry that discharging damages the battery, and the grid side lacks a mechanism for dispatching capacity at scale. Every link was one step short, so the commercial loop never closed.
Chery’s entry closes those gaps one by one and puts trough charging and peak selling into scale operation, so that charging stops being a cost and becomes revenue. The car turns into a storage asset and electricity becomes a tradable good for the owner. The value then travels from the user to the grid and outward to the whole industry.
The owner’s arithmetic is visible
Take the Fulwin A9 as the example. A 70 kWh battery discharging 40 kWh a day across 200 participating days a year produces a theoretical spread of about 5,600 yuan. After site service fees and transaction charges, the owner is expected to receive more than 3,000 yuan, and the figure rises where local V2G discharge subsidies apply.
Chery says it is the first carmaker to offer both single-household and aggregated grid connection. Charging and discharging are handled through an app and cloud dispatch, with travel time, target state of charge and real-time tariffs folded into one calculation. Daily use is unaffected and income arrives automatically.
The value grows with scale. Owners earn the peak-to-valley spread, while the grid gains peak shaving and demand response capability. Once enough vehicles are aggregated into a dispatchable resource pool, larger system benefits follow, including green power absorption and deferred investment in distribution capacity.
State Grid estimates that if 10 per cent of new energy vehicles participate in vehicle-grid interaction by 2030, they could provide up to 86 million kilowatts of regulation capacity, more than the combined installed capacity of every pumped hydro station in China. Chery’s site is a replicable node that brings that estimate closer to reality.
The first large-scale V2G site is now operating in Wuhu. Chery plans second-charge plus V2G stations in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hefei and Wuhu, will launch V2G on the Fulwin A9 battery electric model in the first half of 2027, and has set a target of more than 20,000 standard V2G charging stations worldwide by 2029.
The network behind the station
A station is only the starting point. What decides whether the model can be replicated at scale is the network behind it, and Chery has built one across supercharging, robotic charging, rail charging and home solar-storage-charging.
The Xunlong instant charge terminal is the efficiency base of that network, with 1440 kW of output, 500 km of range in five minutes, and oil-immersed cooling that lifts heat dissipation efficiency by 30 per cent. Instant charging and V2G follow the same grid-friendly logic. Fast charging solves the time cost and V2G solves the cost of energy being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The automatic charging robot offers 0.1 mm repeat positioning accuracy and completes plug insertion within 30 seconds, compatible with 99 per cent of vehicles and DC chargers, so the driver never leaves the car and charging or discharging happens without intervention.
Rail charging attacks the most sensitive cost item in scaling V2G stations, which is land and construction. Combining an overhead guide rail with a robot lets a single 200 kW unit cover 16 to 80 parking spaces, with zero footprint and a three-day commissioning period, about 10 days faster than conventional approaches. Energy Cube 2.0 brings vehicle-grid integration into the home, combining solar, storage, inversion and bidirectional charging in one unit.
Standards decide the export story
Under China’s national standard system, Chery’s alternating current V2G reuses the vehicle’s onboard charger, so households need no additional high-power equipment. Its direct current V2G uses high-voltage silicon carbide devices and reaches 96.5 per cent system efficiency, covering high-power bidirectional scenarios at public sites.
Under European standards, V2G uses direct current at 7 kW and 11 kW, with black start capability that switches between grid-connected and island mode within 10 milliseconds, and anti-reverse-flow design to minimise grid-side risk. During an outage it can supply emergency power to the whole house.
Compatibility across AC and DC and across domestic and foreign standards is what allows Chery’s V2G to extend from homes and public stations into more scenarios and to travel overseas with the vehicles.
The layer nobody prices: communications
The communication layer is the most underrated barrier to V2G at scale. A large installed base of AC chargers and production vehicles has no dedicated hardwired V2G channel, and adding a power line carrier module means extra cost and retrofit work. Chery’s production AC V2G uses Bluetooth between vehicle and charger, reusing the Bluetooth module already in the car and pushing connection cost close to zero.
At the device layer, direct current V2G uses high-voltage silicon carbide power devices with 96.5 per cent system efficiency, and intelligent harmonic compensation holds total harmonic distortion below 3 per cent, better than the 5 per cent national limit. At the platform layer, the Chery energy cloud aggregates V2G vehicles, bidirectional chargers, storage and solar through a virtual power plant, and has launched a dispatch scheme for clusters of a million chargers, organising scattered batteries into an adjustable mobile storage plant.
The most common owner objection is whether frequent charging and discharging damages the battery. Chery’s answer rests on two controls: the cloud constrains the boundaries of discharge, and the pack carries sufficient cycle headroom.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Gasgoo report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://auto.gasgoo.com/news/202610/22I70475515C501.shtml.