Bowen zeroes in on vehicle to grid technology and batteries on wheels

The batteries embedded in electric vehicles are a resource federal Energy and Climate Minister Chris Bowen wants to see harnessed for the benefit of individuals and the grid.

Speaking at the National Press Club on Wednesday, Mr Bowen said he was “very forward leaning” on vehicle-to-grid, vehicle-to-home and other uses of bi-directional flow of energy from car batteries.

“If every car in Australia was electric, we are a long way from that, but … that would be the equivalent in storage of five Snowy 2.0s,” he said.

Empowering households to take control of resources including vehicle batteries, rooftop solar and other technologies, is the “next vital piece of reform” and will be included in the consumer energy roadmap Mr Bowen will present to state and territory counterparts on Friday.

“It is a resource we need to harness and enable households to harness in their own best interest,” Mr Bowen said.

“Cars are batteries on wheels.”

Mr Bowen stressed he was not interested in restricting EV owners from charging at a time of their choosing, however.

While there are still regulatory hurdles to overcome and technical issues to iron out, Mr Bowen wants EV owners to have the choice to use their car batteries to charge their homes or put power back into the grid and get paid for it.

Electric vehicles could “earn” as much as $12,000 a year by acting as storage for renewable energy and feeding it back into the grid, an Australian Renewable Energy Agency report found earlier in the year.

A number of electric vehicles were also used to support the national grid during an emergency earlier this year in a real-world test run by Australian National University.

Mr Bowen’s press club address focused on the opposition’s nuclear energy policy .

Renewables and nuclear were “simply incompatible”, he said, casting doubt over the opposition’s commitment to “an ‘all of the above’ energy mix”.

“Their ideological pursuit of nuclear reactors in two decades’ time would wreck the renewables rollout now.”

It would chill investment in solar and wind and be unsuitable in a grid already made up of 40 per cent renewables capable of bringing the wholesale cost of power to zero and even into the negative when the sun shines and wind blows.

“Is the coalition’s plan to curtail zero cost renewable energy to make room for expensive nuclear energy when renewables drive wholesale prices to very low levels, or is their plan to bankroll these baseload plants to bid into the system at prices where they’ll bleed money?”

“For those reasons, Australians can choose reliable renewables or risky reactors – but not both.”

AAP