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Vehicle-to-grid technology could lead help reduce overall emissions

Published January 21, 2021

Vehicle-to-grid projects could reduce emissions and create savings between £412-883m per year in the UK, a major collaborative project has found.

Vehicle-to-grid, or V2G, technology allows electric vehicles to give back the energy stored in their batteries to the electricity grid when they are not in use, thus helping to contribute to sustainability measures.

Nissan, E.ON, and Imperial College London are behind the project, dubbed e4Future, which is part of the Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) competition funded by the Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and the Office for Zero Emission Vehicles (OZEV), in partnership with Innovate UK.

Unlike charging point projects, which aim to enable a quicker transition to EV vehicles by installing charging points in as many strategic areas as possible, V2G requires a more fundamental shift in the infrastructure.

As Nick Fedson, sustainability analyst at Alfa Energy Group points out: “Charging point projects have better commercial success today. V2G projects are part of a deeper transformation of the energy system and require better policy support today.”

A resulting White Paper was published on 7 January, presenting what challenges the project faces (such as high initial costs and energy consumption patterns) as well as recommendations to move forward.

The White Paper suggests that V2G could help support the UK in a cost-effective transition to a low-carbon future. Among some of the benefits are a reduced need to reinforce distribution networks, more efficient provision of balancing services, a negative carbon impact, and reduction of CO2 emissions per EV of around 60 tonnes per annum.

For this transition to happen, widespread adoption of V2G needs to be backed by appropriate market and regulatory conditions, and the White Paper makes a variety of recommendations on this front. The costs of implementation of V2G technology would be offset by incentivising policies.

Tags distributed energy electric vehicles renewables vehicle to grid