Question: Could you comment on Vehicle to Grid (V2G) and how this would be best managed in a large owners corporation?
Timely article. Could you comment on V2G please? In future a >300 apartment block may want to participate in the impending Demand Response market. If 150 EV owners had their vehicles plugged in, this represents 9 MWh available to the apartment block and also the grid at peak times. This would be good for the grid, negate the need for apartment blocks to consider batteries, limit upgrades of the Body Corporate (BC) microgrid and a revenue source for EV owners.
Embedded Network Managers are permitted to provide financial services, so appear to be the logical means of managing not only the present consumption billing but credits due to EV back up and the capital repayments of the EV charging installation (via service fees). This frees the volunteers on the BC committee of funding day to day electricity management.
Are there any extra components your proposals need to consider to future proof itself, assume the regulators will catch up and allow for dynamic price signaling.
Answer: V2G or Vehicle to Grid (&V2X) indeed has the potential to re-shape what the electricity landscape looks like.
Great question, and valid points raised to what the new energy era could evolve into for strata or multi-dwelling developments. V2G or Vehicle to Grid (&V2X) indeed has the potential to re-shape what the electricity landscape looks like.
It takes the humble car from being a method of transport, to a portable battery pack that can power not only itself, but buildings and other devices such as work sites, tools, fridges and the luxuries when camping! (Vehicle2Load)
Selected EV’s can bank power just like home batteries and send it back the other way when needed, providing potentially megawatts of portable power in a multi-dwelling situation. Almost more importantly is they also provide effective frequency control for stabilising the electricity grid (keeping things at 50Hz), a critical factor the utilities desperately must maintain.
In fact, already this is being demonstrated in Australia by JET Charge under a Commonwealth ARENA research trial in collaboration with the ANU, Nissan, ActewAGL, Evoenergy, SG Fleet and the ACT Government. The positive research data to date signal that V2G could play an important role in the future.
Think about it. You drive to work and during the day and charge up off your company’s building EV chargers under your salary package, which is offset by peak solar production and then drive home to power your home. Then do it all again.
Currently, only 2 or 3 EV’s in the Australian market are V2G capable and the special V2G chargers are not fully certified for sale in Australia as yet, apart for the aforementioned research purposes only. We anticipate during 2022 a clearer roadmap for V2G that requires not only regulations to keep up with the technology, but the utilities must have mechanisms to cater for V2G activity. This is all currently under consideration, so it is still early days for V2G.
For now, important considerations in building upgrades are the key base build including an on-premise EV Energy Management System with the ability to scale as EV ownership does. This potentially in the future may be partnered with a cloud software layer that deal with dynamic price signalling, bidding and other beneficial outcomes for the body corporate.
Watch this space.
This post appears in Strata News #532.
Mark Jeisman
JET Charge
E: mark@jetcharge.com.au
P: 1300 856 328
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