Vehicle To Grid: Is the Future of Energy in Your Garage?

Vehicle to grid V2G allows you to get paid to send charge from your car battery to supply the grid. I’ve been keen on V2G ever since I first heard of it. It feels like a two for one deal: you buy a car and you effectively get a home battery as a bonus. And on the society-wide level, we roll out electric cars to clean up transport, and we end up with a solution for some of the biggest challenges of an all-renewable electricity grid.

The fact is that cars spend most of their time parked. A fully charged EV battery can power a house for several days. And even though a car battery sounds small compared to a whole electricity grid, together the potential is huge. If all of Australia’s vehicles were electric, the total storage would be vastly more than any grid scale battery like the Hornsdale Power Reserve’s 'Tesla Big Battery.' In fact it would be over three days worth of the current electricity consumption of the National Energy Market and five times as large as Snowy Hydro 2.0 and with far fewer delays and cost blowouts.

I’ve covered V2G before, when I visited the Australian National University to talk about their research project Realising Electric Vehicle-to-grid Services and in that video I asked the question: if V2G is so great, why aren’t we already doing it? Well, today we’re going to take a look at a few home and small business projects that show that V2G is moving beyond trials—it’s now a real-world option for households and small businesses.

Today, in South Australia, we're visiting real-world installations to see how it works and to hear the experiences of the owners. South Australia is the perfect place for this video for two reasons. First, their electricity grid has the highest proportion of variable renewables in the world, at 70%. And they plan to be at 100% and even beyond within a few years. This is great for electric vehicles because not only are there no tailpipe emissions but there are no emissions from power generation either. And it raises challenges that V2G is well placed to solve. The second reason that South Australia is the perfect place to film a video about V2G is that it’s the only state in Australia whose grid allows it. And in fact there aren’t many other places in the world.

Thanks to MG Australia for loaning me an MG ZS EV to drive around and film this video.

If you would like to help develop the Engineering with Rosie channel, you could consider joining the Patreon community, where there is a chat community (and Patreon-only Discord server) about topics covered in the videos and suggestions for future videos and production quality improvements.   / engineeringwithrosie  

Or for a one-off contribution you can support by buying a coffee ☕️ here —
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/engwithr...

The Engineering with Rosie team is:
Rosemary Barnes: presenter, producer, writer
Javi Diez: editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/javierdie...

Bookmarks:
00:00 Intro
02:58 How does V2G work?
03:41 What is V2L and V2H?
04:01 Ballycroft Vineyard
05:44 V2G components and costs
07:46 Residential V2G setup
09:18 How much can you earn with V2G?
10:33 Can you use V2L to power your home?
12:56 HOEM Home Open Energy Manager
14:13 Outro

Links:
https://www.ballycroft.com/
https://cartell.tv/hoem/