Bruegel: Europe's EVs hold 600 GWh, about ten times its stationary storage

Europe's electric vehicles carry an estimated 600 GWh of battery capacity, about ten times the 60 GWh of stationary battery storage connected to the continent's grid by 2024, according to the European Clean Tech Atlas that the Brussels think tank Bruegel published on September 2, 2026 and launched the same morning at its Annual Meetings. Bruegel puts the European grid's average draw at around 320 GW. Assuming away physical constraints, it says the stationary fleet could absorb or supply that output for about a quarter of an hour, while the vehicle fleet, if all of it were connected, could hypothetically absorb the grid's continuous output for almost two hours. Both spans are power-versus-energy arithmetic.

The Atlas keeps the vehicle figure hypothetical. Technologies for smart integration of EV batteries into the grid, "both physical and virtual", are under development, it says; its example is the Dutch car-sharing firm MyWheels, whose cars trade electricity into the Utrecht grid when plugged in. The chart beside the passage reads 594 GWh for vehicles and 61 GWh for stationary storage, credited to Bruegel calculations based on SolarPower Europe data. Bruegel says household batteries represent a little over half of the connected storage market.

The 60 GWh figure is a 2024 snapshot. SolarPower Europe's European Battery Market Outlook 2026-2030, announced on June 23, 2026, counts 36 GWh installed in 2025, an annual market up 48% on 2024, and says those additions took Europe's operational battery capacity beyond 100 GWh for the first time, with utility-scale projects delivering more than half of new installations for the first time. A California report, the GridLab, Kevala, and E3 blueprint published in August 2026, ran a version of the comparison with an enrollment share attached: 10 percent of the light-duty EVs the California Energy Commission projects for 2036, enrolled in vehicle-to-grid programs, could supply 30 percent of the state's cumulative utility-scale storage procurement target for that year, if V2G resources are accredited and operated on a comparable basis with grid-scale storage.