It is important to allocate supply and demand between when people need electricity to drive their cars and when they need electricity to run their homes. “Yes, if everyone were to plug in at the same time and charge a car to full capacity, that would be true,” said Jan Kleissl, director of the Center for Energy Research at the University of California, San Diego. doesn’t work with this outdated charging model.” , who do not participate in the new model. “But if we can change the demand, then we can definitely make it work because no vehicle needs to be charged 24 hours a day.”
Commercial and government vehicles, such as public transport or school buses, can also connect to V2G. A company called Nuvve, which develops V2G technology, has work with school districts in Southern California to turn their buses—with extraordinary battery packs—into V2G assets. School buses run on a reliable schedule, so their batteries can power the grid after dropping students off, then recharge in time to pick up students the next day. On weekends and holidays, the bus battery will always be ready.
One of the perks of V2G is that it can subsidize the cost of owning an electric vehicle: The longer the car sits in your garage, the more money you make. “If you’re the type of person who can work from home and don’t have to drive an electric vehicle as often, getting involved in V2G could bring in some revenue,” says Gasper. “So you are providing more utility to the vehicle to help redirect the cost of vehicle ownership, which is huge.”
You might think that more use will quickly reduce the life of the battery, but that is not always the case. “If you own an EV and don’t drive it often, V2G really can extend the life of your car battery,” says Gasper. Flushing it out from time to time is basically training it to keep it healthy. “There are two ways to kill a battery, and one is to keep it fully charged—why laptop batteries die so quickly. And the other is to use it continuously.”
However, large-scale V2G faces some major challenges. For one thing, not every EV is equipped for two-way charging, although automakers are increasingly applying those capabilities to vehicles like New Nissan Leaf and Ford F-150. It also requires a special charger that reverses the current to get power out of the battery. Given those limitations, V2G is still in the early stages of development, with around 100 pilot programs running worldwide.
On the other hand, there is no industry standard for V2G crossover components: Currently, there is a wide range of vehicles from different manufacturers that plug into different charging systems that themselves plug into the grids. difference.
And utilities can offer different compensation, whether individual electric vehicle owners or fleet operators. “One of the things we really need to find out is: What incentives do we need to offer motorists in both categories in order for them to participate?” Joseph Vellone of Ev.energy, which makes software that regulates EV charging, and is working with a consortium of charger makers and automakers to test V2G strategies.
