Sunverge, Nissan and Wallbox partner on vehicle to home and grid technologies

Californian solar and storage company Sunverge has teamed up with Spanish EV charging company Wallbox, car maker Nissan and Australian energy retailer Simply Energy to design and deliver an integrated EV management system incorporating both Vehicle-to-Home and Vehicle-to-Grid services.

The four companies announced on Wednesday that they would work together to develop an integrated solution that combines an advanced Vehicle-to-Home (V2H) capability with an intelligent Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) system, allowing for real-time and flexible multi-asset load management.

Combining Sunverge’s advanced intelligent energy management platform, Wallbox’s Quasar bi-directional in-home EV charging stations, and Nissan’s landmark Leaf EV, the resulting system will not only be able to control EV charging but also use of the EV batteries.

This, in turn, means that electric utilities will be able to harness a fleet of V2H-connected batteries to further enhance their distributed energy resource (DER) control and flexible load management.

The four-way partnership will also allow Sunverge, Nissan Australia, and Wallbox to jointly study the opportunities inherent in V2G technology such as frequency regulation and response.

“The electrification of transportation along with electrification of homes and commercial buildings are two of the vital trends integral to decarbonizing the world’s energy infrastructure,” said Martin Milani, CEO of Sunverge.

“That effort will require expanded control, orchestration and aggregation of power from electric vehicles offering utilities a way to harness them as distributed energy resources.

If successful in delivering a charging management solution that is able to integrate the disparate parts of its goal, the result could be a massive step change in the uptake of not only electric vehicles in Australia, but also solar and storage.

Nissan’s Ben Warren said the Leaf is currently the only bi-directional capable battery electric vehicle from factory on the Australian market today.

“With this program, we hope to be able to showcase the opportunity a Nissan Leaf can provide when paired with the right hardware, control systems and energy plans to unlock benefits for not only Nissan customers, but the wider energy grid and all energy users,” he said.

Australia is seeing numerous trials and demonstrations of how home solar and storage can act as a virtual battery for utilities, providing vital grid smoothing and load management so as to ease the integration of variable and distributed renewable energy sources.