European power firms aim to harness electric car batteries
Ever wanted to run your electric car for free? If you're open to a bit of give and take, then stay plugged in and your wishes might come true. At least that's what some European power companies and Japanese carmakers believe.
E.ON and EDF are already working with Nissan to develop services that allow power stored in electric vehicle batteries to be sold back to the grid - and now they're trying to persuade European carmakers to follow suit.
With millions of electric cars expected on European roads over the next decade, utility firms see both an opportunity to sell drivers more electricity and a risk that surges in charging at peak times could destabilize stressed power grids.
That's why E.ON is working with Nissan to develop so-called vehicle-to-grid (V2G) services, including software for aggregating and marketing charging data so the German power company can predict peaks and troughs in electricity demand.
Nissan's idea is that if you charge your electric vehicle (EV) at off-peak times and are prepared to sell power back to the grid when it's under strain, you could effectively charge for free.
French utility EDF has teamed up with San Diego-based V2G technology specialist Nuvve nuvve.com to build the first commercial-scale V2G charging network in Europe for vehicles made by Japan's Nissan and Mitsubishi.
Europe's biggest utility by market value, Italy's Enel, has also worked with Nissan and Nuvve on V2G pilots in Denmark and the Netherlands, as well as in Rome and Genoa.
The problem for the utilities is that unlike Nissan, the French and German firms that will make most of the electric cars expected on Europe's road in coming years are not playing ball - at least for now.
E.ON and EDF are talking to European carmakers about taking V2G seriously, according to two industry sources, but they are more focused on EV charging technology that the sources say is less suited to two-way flows than Japanese standards.
IONITY ionity.eu, a joint venture of Volkswagen, Daimler, BMW and Ford, said it did not see an initial case for V2G in its drive to install high-speed charging stations across Europe to facilitate long-distance journeys.
“Our clients want to charge fast and not feed back in,” a spokesman for IONITY said. “Only in combination with an external storage system would a use case possibly be interesting.”
The other big V2G holdout is EV pioneer Tesla, which also sells large stationary batteries for home power storage. Tesla declined to comment on V2G.
The idea of using millions of EV batteries as large virtual power plants to put power back into the grid has been around for years though the concept is still mostly at the pilot phase, mainly because there are very few EVs on the roads now.
But its appeal to the power industry is obvious.
With a typical car driving less than 10 percent of the day, the rest of the time car batteries could be used to balance out demand and supply swings in energy networks that increasingly need to juggle intermittent solar and wind power.
That's the case in Germany in particular as it is phasing out baseload nuclear and coal-fired plants, unlike France and Japan which are sticking with nuclear to ensure a secure supply.
Jonathan Tudor, director of technology strategy at the innovation division of Britain's biggest utility, Centrica, said V2G will be part of the mix of technologies stabilizing networks - once more EVs hit the road.