Essential Energy and CSIRO have launched a project that will explore vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology to better understand how to use electric vehicles (EVs) as battery storage as part of home energy management while assisting the network during times of peak power demand.
“At the moment you can buy a battery and connect it to your home, but those batteries have small storage capacities compared to an EV which has as much as five times more storage,” said Dr Sam Behrens, senior research engineer at CSIRO’s Newcastle Energy Centre and technical lead for the collaboration with Essential Energy.
“If you use your EV to store solar energy as it is generated during the day, you can then use that for night-time electricity needs. It can also be used to support the grid, enhancing reliability and resilience by flattening peak loads.”
The trial will be staged at Essential Energy’s Innovation Hub at Port Macquarie on the New South Wales mid-north coast where a fully equipped ‘residential house of the future’ has been created.
By using resources and loads that are fully controllable, the research team will be able to replicate different household profiles and scenarios, allowing a range of experiments to be conducted on electricity usage patterns, charge and discharge behaviors, and network stability.
CSIRO Transport Electrification team lead Kate Cavanagh said the trial will explore how V2G technology can be integrated into buildings and the broader grid and will aim to identify potential obstacles that could impede the uptake of the technology.
“V2G technologies have enormous potential and they’re going to play a big part in the future electricity system, but at the moment our understanding of how they might work in the Australian context is limited,” she said.
“Our project is set in regional Australia, and we are using real household appliances in a laboratory setting to provide a range of realistic and controllable household types and scenarios to test out V2G.”
Despite wide interest, V2G technology currently has limited availability in Australia and only some EVs support the technology.
It is expected the CSIRO–Essential Energy trial will play a role in advancing the technical and regulatory standards required to support the successful roll out of V2G technology in Australia.
“The collaboration between CSIRO and Essential Energy will help to develop energy-efficient products and services for customers to support them through the energy transition and to trial user-friendly ways to manage home electricity usage,” Essential Energy Chief Operating Officer Luke Jenner said, adding that V2G technology also has the potential to lower costs by “offsetting the need for additional investment in the network.”
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