VEHICLE-TO-GRID
78 // January 2020 // www.electrichybridvehicletechnology.com
underway globally, examining how electric cars
could mitigate their own impact on the grid.
Julian Dunn, head of energy storage
products at Ricardo, sees this as a bigger
benefi t than providing a backup for individual
homes. “Where you’re really looking for V2G
to make a diff erence is when one in three,
or one in four vehicles on the street is
electric. They could quite easily balance
out the peak load. We’re not looking at
providing the base load for the country
off EVs in power-cut scenarios – it’s just
levelling the peak load.”
Research suggests this could be an
eff ective buff er. In the UK, the National
Grid mapped out the eff ects of smarter
“Electric vehicle penetration is going
to happen very fast and is going to
drastically impact the utility space”
Gregory Poilasne, chairman and CEO, Nuvve
The roadmap to mass electric
transport is becoming clearer,
defi ned by tightening CO2 limits and
deadlines for combustion engines to
be phased out in some of the world’s
largest-volume markets. It’s the automotive
industry’s biggest step change since the dawn
of mass production, but an even bigger leap
for the utility companies tasked with keeping
that fl eet moving.
“We see an infl ection point in terms of
electric vehicle adoption around 2021,” says
Gregory Poilasne, chairman and CEO of San
Diego-based vehicle-to-grid (V2G) platform
Nuvve. “The acceleration of electric vehicle
penetration is going to happen very fast and is
going to drastically impact the utility space.
But we are convinced that V2G is going
to solve this problem of the integration
of both renewable energy generation
and electric vehicles.”
The hardware required to enable
vehicles to feed energy back into the
grid isn’t next-generation technology
– it’s already commercially available.
Bidirectional charging is already
supported by the Chademo standard,
as is a protocol enabling the vehicle to
communicate battery state of charge to
the charging point and beyond. Nissan
and Mitsubishi introduced this capability
in production models following the 2011
Tohoku earthquake in Japan, initially to
provide a backup domestic power supply
during blackouts, but numerous pilots are
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