The road to bidirectional CCS electric car charging

As a result of my recent article about the fading of the CHAdeMO standard for DC charging, the question has arisen – “so what happens to V2X with the demise of CHAdeMO?”

(‘V2X’ by the way stands for Vehicle to Grid or Home. It is the combination way of referring to the capability to use an EV battery bi-directionally to feed the home and/or grid as well as charge it).

Currently only CHAdeMO is certified – in some countries – to do this. In fact, CHAdeMO has long been touted as the only DC standard that does it as a marketing point of difference to CCS. Therefore – does the demise of CHAdeMO end the future for V2X?

The short answer is “no, but it may be delayed a little bit”. CharIN (the consortium supporting CCS) actually has a roadmap for implementing V2H and then V2G into the CCS standard. (This is shown in figure 1).

This roadmap for CCS to reach full V2G capability is expected to be completed by around 2025. As you can see – there are many issues to overcome if level 4 (V2G) is to become truly ubiquitous – and that applies to CHAdeMO too!

These issues revolve around grid capacity to handle and control V2X in a safe and secure way.

This means a number of international standards must be agreed, then built into the communications hardware and software in the cars, the chargers AND the grid. So to some degree, even if CHAdeMO lasts the distance to 2025 – it will only be then that CHAdeMO could have fulfilled its promise to be a fully V2G system anyway – which is when CCS is expected to reach that end point as well.

So the slightly more nuanced answer to the question “what happens to V2X after CHAdeMO?” is V2H may be delayed by a year or two, but V2G capability is likely unaffected as it will take at least that long for  the grid to be ready for it.

Given most EVs are already CCS – this means there is no change at all to current owners as they can’t do V2G or V2H now anyway (and most likely never will unless they buy a new car when CCS V2X capabilities are introduced: after all, most car manufacturers – except Tesla – HATE upgrading cars after they are built!)