Federal energy and climate minister Chris Bowen says that agreement on new standards means that EV owners will be able to use vehicle to grid (V2G) technology – effectively using their cars as batteries on wheels – by the end of the year.
In a speech to an EV conference in Sydney on Saturday that Standards Australia has ticked off the new standard that will allow vehicle to grid charging in Australia.
“If you’ve got a car with V2G capability and a bidirectional device, you could be using that car to power your house before the end of this year,” Bowen said.
He said car companies can immediately start having their bidirectional devices tested to the revised standard, then apply to the Clean Energy Council to have their devices assessed and listed.
Once listed, distribution networks can then confirm that they can be plugged into their local grids.
“It means when you pick your next EV you won’t be buying just a car, you’ll be buying a household battery on wheels,” Bowen said.
V2G technology is hailed by many experts as a critical part of a future grid dominated by renewables, simply because of the extraordinary resource that will exist in the battery packs of millions of EVs around the country, providing both bulk energy when needed and critical grid services.
However, the opportunities have been limited. Only two vehicles – the Nissan Leaf and the Mitsubishi Outlander plug in hybrid have had the capability, thanks to their Chademo plug protocols – but most new EVs have not, because they are on a different protocol, CCS2.
Those challenges are now being overcome, and a series of trials across the country has helped satisfy the grid operators and the network owners that the technology can be safely deployed without adverse impacts on the grid. It is not clear, however, exactly how many EV makers will support that technology.
“It’s not going to happen overnight for everyone,” Bowen said. “Not every manufacturer is at the same place, but it’s now going to be enabled in our system. So, it’s a really, really important step forward.”
It points to the radical change in the way the electricity grid is managed. Once top down with only centralised generation sources, the grid is now becoming increasingly dominated by consumer energy resources – rooftop solar, household batteries, electric vehicles and other smart appliances.
“It’s about ensuring grid stability, and it’s about ensuring maximum use of every single electron– ensuring consumers get maximum value from their assets.
It will mean being able to export as much of their rooftop solar as they want to. Being able to control when you draw from the grid, or when you rely on the energy you’re producing yourself. Turning consumers into prosumers
“And for households with electric vehicles, it’s about making sure our grids, and our rules are set up so you can use those electric vehicles like household batteries on wheels.
“For the vast majority of people, the battery in your electric vehicle, when you get one, is going to be much more powerful than a battery in your home. Most car batteries can store up to five times more energy than household batteries.
So you could be charging your car off your solar panels during the day, and then if you don’t need the car much the next day, you can choose to reverse charge your house with the energy from your car battery at night, when the solar panels aren’t producing.
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Giles Parkinson is founder and editor of The Driven, and also edits and founded the Renew Economy and One Step Off The Grid web sites. He has been a journalist for nearly 40 years, is a former business and deputy editor of the Australian Financial Review, and owns a Tesla Model 3.