IS-Centric Business Models for a Sustainable Economy - The Case of Electric Vehicles as Energy Storage

The use of electric vehicles as reasonable alternatives to conventional vehicles with combustion engines will become more attractive in the near future. In addition, the ongoing energy turnaround increases the required amount of regulation reserves to stabilize the power grid. In this paper, we employ an Energy Informatics approach to construct an IS-centric business model to coordinate the charging processes of thousands of electric vehicles and sell this aggregated storage at an energy market. Furthermore, we analyze the effect of various management strategies for the IS artifact. We demonstrate that the business model can yield high revenues by utilizing electric vehicles as distributed storage devices for frequency regulation. This additional revenue stream for vehicle owners further increases the appeal of this sustainable technology.