Monetizing Shared EV Fleets Through Demand Charge Reduction Services

The widespread adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) is hindered by their high acquisition cost and low asset utilization. To address this, this paper proposes a novel vehicle-to-building (V2B) business model to monetize idle, shared EV fleets. In this model, a lightweight coordination platform enables a shared fleet of EVs to sequentially serve peak-shaving requests from multiple commercial and industrial (C&I) users, generating revenue by reducing their costly demand charges. This business model is built upon three core components. First, the shared-use business architecture itself dramatically increases asset utilization. Second, a privacy-by-design, threshold-based mechanism empowers users to autonomously generate requests without sharing sensitive data. Third, a provably optimal and scalable matching algorithm, based on an exact time-decoupled reformulation, ensures efficient, real-time dispatch. Extensive simulations using real-world data from San Francisco buildings validate this model’s powerful win-win proposition: C&I users achieve substantial monthly savings, while EV owners can earn a lucrative passive income stream that exceeds typical ride-hailing earnings, thereby strengthening the economic case for transportation electrification.