MAJOR CAR MAKERS ARE LAUNCHING ELECTRIC VEHICLES WHICH CAN SUPPORT LOCAL POWER NETWORKS
In the European Autumn of 2024, Renault plans to launch a vehicle-to-grid (V2G) offering for residential customers first in France and Germany, and then the UK. Think of it as a ‘series 1’ product offering that reflects the early stage of industry development, but that points to a belief shared by many European automakers: that V2G has mainstream market potential.
An annual V2G conference in Münster, Germany earlier this month heard from Renault, Volkswagen and BMW about the market readiness of their V2G technology and how they are approaching the challenges and opportunities presented by legacy regulatory frameworks, market incentives and consumer preferences.
These are the first movers, but over the next couple of years we expect at least 43 vehicles to come to market with similar capabilities.
Vehicle-to-X (V2X) is a set of capabilities that allows electric vehicles to export power to a home or building (V2H/B), to the grid (V2G) or directly to an electrical appliance (V2L). Working definitions of the technology in a report we prepared for ARENA in 2023.
The interest in V2G is driven by one fundamental reality: The potential economic value of the batteries inside our society’s growing EV fleet extends well beyond mobility applications. They have the potential to contribute to substantial cost reductions for vehicle owners and can help with the integration of renewable energy and particularly, rooftop solar PV.
The size of the opportunity is simply enormous. Our summary report for ARENA found that our EV fleet energy storage capacity will be larger that all our form of grid energy storage by the mid 2030’s and (conservatively) nearly four times the size of all the storage needed to balance renewables in EU electricity markets by 2050.
The capital costs are also very low, potentially only 6% of the current costs of utility scale battery storage. This is made possible because EV batteries are designed to greatly exceed the mobility needs of most customers most of the time.
Much of this capacity will be idle and using it for other purposes has negligible (if any) short-term cost to the vehicle owner, and an increasingly minor impact on battery life.
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