Forbes columnist Tom Konrad is evidently better at reading Chinese than I am, and he reports that:

The city of Hangzhou just signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Kandi Technologies and nine other companies to supply 20,000 electric vehicles (EVs) for the city’s “pilot” EV leasing program.

This news is of great interest to us here at V2G Limited because not only that, but also:

Other companies involved will supply the batteries (Air Lithium (Lyoyang) Co. Ltd.) and charging by the local utility.  The utility will fund construction of a charging and battery swap station network as well as paying for the batteries.

 

The batteries will serve a dual use for grid stabilization, or Vehicle to Grid (V2G) technology.  The batteries will be financed by charges to electricity customers because of this dual use.  So, in addition to this being the largest EV sale ever announced, the project is also effectively the largest scale trial of the use of EV batteries for V2G.

The comments on the story clarify that:

The greedy utilities don’t want to share [the] value with consumers – that’s the only problem with V2G.

To that I would add the rider that (over here in Europe at least) V2G technology isn’t ready for “prime-time” just yet for another reason. The standards are still being developed apart from anything else.

Note that at the end of his report Tom also discloses that he is:

Long NASD:KNDI