Guide To… Vehicle-to-Grid Charging

The perks of electric vehicles don’t just stop at zero emissions and lower running costs. The entire purpose of switching to an EV is to break free of the stranglehold of fossil fuels in order to live a cleaner, more sustainable life.

We have already detailed how electric cars can be run on renewable energy alone in order to truly drive emissions-free, and how electric car batteries can be reused to store renewable energy in your home or business.

Today we’re looking at an often overlooked perk of electric vehicles: Vehicle-to-Grid charging.

What Is Vehicle-to-Grid?

When we charge our electric cars at home – the primary place of charging electric vehicles due to lower cost and lower carbon intensity – the car is connected to our house via a cable, so that energy from our homes can be transferred to our cars.

Vehicle-to-Grid reverses this, allowing energy from your car to be used to power your home, or to be fed back into the national electricity grid.

Where Vehicle-to-Grid could really shine in the near future, is in supporting the wider rollout of renewable energy, such a rooftop solar.

While even a modest rooftop solar array could provide enough energy to run your home on a daily basis, without somewhere to store this energy, you either need to use it or lose it.

Using your car’s battery to store solar or wind energy when they are at peak production levels means less wasted energy, as you can keep it for when you need it most – not just for driving to the shops or work, but also for cooking dinner and having a shower.

When thousands, or millions, of electric cars are used in tandem for smarter energy consumption, this can make a major impact on the grid – meaning less fossil fuels are used to support energy demand on a national level, helping to make the prospect of a 100% renewable-powered grid a possibility much sooner.

There are also major benefits when it comes to grid instability.

For example, if an area is hit by a blackout during a storm, your house wouldn’t be affected, as it would be running off locally-produced energy from your solar panels, or locally-stored energy from your electric car.

When Will Vehicle-To-Grid Happen?

You may well think this all sounds a bit futuristic, or even idealistic. However, vehicle-to-grid is already here, and there are a number of large-scale initiatives already underway.

A great example of this is a project in the Netherlands, which has seen the installation of almost 500 bi-directional chargers across 21 municipalities over the past two years.

This isn’t the only Vehicle-to-Grid project by any means, and a flurry of EV manufacturers are fast becoming involved in similar trials, with Renault and Hyundai also supporting similar projects in the Netherlands and elsewhere.

Furthermore, Nissan has developed a Vehicle-to-Grid kit to retrofit homes to use this technology. In Ireland, the average home uses between 11-14kWh per day, according to the Commission for the Regulation of Utilities.

As such, even an older electric car with a relatively small battery, such as a 24kWh Nissan Leaf, would be capable of running your home for almost two full days on its own, without any external power input.

It is likely that this is something that we’ll be hearing a lot more about in the years to come, so we hope that this will serve as a helpful introductory guide to Vehicle-to-Grid and recommend further research into how it can make your home even more sustainable.

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