Batteries on Wheels can they Solve the UK’s Power Shortage?
this is not an electric car and neither is that or that and that's certainly not an electric car what they are in fact are batteries with wheels that even say so on this display here but the great thing about these new batteries with wheels is you get some seats sat nav and you might even have a sound system there but today we're going to travel in this battery on wheels to an electrical installation as part of the future where this battery on wheels becomes part of the power grid not just to power your house but to potentially power everybody's house so i've arrived here just outside of ipswich and this car in front of us here is actually providing power to the grid we're here to meet claire miller director of technology and innovation of octopus electric vehicles to find out more so claire thanks for inviting me along to see the future and if you haven't guessed already what we're looking at it is vehicle to grid technology (V2G) so using your car battery on that battery on wheels to power this house but also support the national grid network why do we need that so yeah batteries on wheels and why do we need to be doing this i think it's a bit counter-intuitive while i charge my car and then want to take energy out of the battery once i've got it in there because i want to drive my car around and i think it is that concept of thinking about your car as a car at some times and as a battery on wheels at others so actually if we can take a bit of energy out of your vehicle and my vehicle thousands and thousands of evs in the future that can really help to support the grid at times when there's a really high demand on the grid so think about tea time we'll come home we've got induction hubs kettles actually across the whole country we're all doing that but the load on the grid starts to go up and up and up and to meet that high load at the moment we have to burn gas so we want to get away from burning fossil fuels for lots of reasons one way to do that is actually bring more renewables onto the grid so wind and solar we can use that to put in our vehicles when that's abundant so maybe when it's windy and sunny we can store that in our vehicles and then at tee time when the grid load starts to go up and up and up we take a bit of that from each of those vehicles when there's high load to share that with your neighbours show that back to the grid and and the other part which all evs can do and are doing more and more is having a place to store energy made by renewables both those things together is vehicle to grid okay i mean i've looked i was the evs that the batteries compared to actually what most people travel on a daily basis there is enormous capacity in those batteries isn't it i don't know what the average commute 15 miles each way per day yet you've got a car that might do two or three hundred miles so for most people that should be trivial really we hear a lot about range anxiety will my battery take me to where i want it to go and for most people these batteries are pretty big compared to what they're doing day to day so yeah about 15 miles maybe 20 miles a day a 200 mile battery range is going to last you a very long time we can start to use that battery to help support the grid help to give a place to store energy in that way you're really maximizing that battery so you know you might not be driving around that much and also you might hear cars are parked up a lot you know we use them each side of the day often for a commute and in between they're parked up using that battery that vehicle in lots of different ways more than just driving around yes i mean it's a different way for people to think isn't it yeah totally yeah this is yeah for some people yeah that sounds common sense but you're going to take energy awfully and charge me again i'm thinking of pounds why why would i want to do that what's in it for me why would you want to do that uh because you're a very good samaritan gordon and you want to share with a grid um share with the world but actually you know at octopus the way that we see this working is actually we want to give the customers great tariffs coming into their home but also you're giving some energy back to the grid you're exporting so we have a tariff that goes in the other direction as well where you get paid two tariffs one that comes in your standard one one that goes out which you might not be familiar with if you haven't got solar if you haven't got a battery yet and actually by making the tariff cheap for customers overnight at times at which they might also be providing their battery to store energy outside of that cheap window and then for paying customers when they do give energy back to the grid again we have a window of time and actually outside of that if there are times when the grid is calling for extra energy vcg can get involved in that as well we can reward customers that way so just to unpack that you've got a really attractive tariff when there's loads of renewables available at night the winds turning those turbines you know the grid needs somewhere to get rid of that energy and storing it in batteries but then the flip side of it is you can also earn money by giving some of that energy back when we're in those busy peak periods when the grid's got a lot of demand yeah that's it and again at octopus as an energy business we want to give customers confidence that they're getting a really good tariff and we want to make it really simple as well we are thinking about this as hundreds of thousands of customers it's our first smart charging tariff and it does that overnight piece that you mentioned so actually we tell your car when to charge and when to not charge overnight to make best use and best support of the grid when it is windy when there are renewables available and in return for that we give customers our best tariffs so it's seven and a half p per kilowatt hour overnight at the moment between half 11 and then half 5 am and also the system is so clever that if it can if it detects from a signal from the grid a message coming in to say hey look it's a really windy evening we want to charge cars at 10 pm or 9 pm we'll also give customers that cheap rate at those times as well giving the grid somewhere to put this renewable energy we think it's really important that customers can participate in that and get like good tariff for that power loop takes it even further vehicle to grid when you give energy back to the grid you should have security about what you're going to get for that again our system automatically detects when the grid needs energy takes in messages coming in from the grid from your local grid from the national grid and others and says hey export energy to the grid now we'll give you this tariff and if it's exporting outside of those times you'll still get that really great tariff yeah because there's some people yeah some people like to live and breathe this and i've seen some of these energy apps we've used the my energy one in the past oh yeah for a few weeks it's quite addictive watching the power flow but then normal life returns and you have to do things and just having that automatically in the background is great and you've deployed it in your own house yeah here we are sitting in my house and i've had vehicle degrade running since august 2020 i wouldn't want to do something to a customer that i wouldn't do to my own house and my own family um so yeah we've lived with it here and actually we've we've developed like the app the service the scheduling so the whole thing you know works on schedules you let the system know when you want your car back and how much charge you want in your vehicle and like learning to trust the system so i've lived and breathed that i think the other thing that's important is around the limit we won't go below so we won't go below 30 state of charge when we're exporting to the grid and that's been really important to build trust and confidence with customers that we won't take all of their battery and now we've got some other technology here we've got the wallbox quasar outside the g100 export limiting device which we tested here prototyped here you mentioned the quasar so that relies on that the nissan leaf wasn't it and that's feeding dc back out of the car and you have to have a bit of a special charger there which is the query where the power electronics are converting back from dc back to ac as well and obviously people will say well that's a bit specialist chademo's a sort of it was an early adopters technology is there plans for it to become more mainstream chademo the combination of the charger the actual shape of the charger gun itself it goes in the car and the communications software that goes between the car and the charger it was developed in japan they started to put more investment into technologies which would give grid resilience at a really like house to house level and actually we're just starting to think about that now in this country um and chademo was part of that thinking what if i've got an electric car parked at my home how do i get a bit of energy out of that car to power the house if maybe the grid around is struggling it's exactly what we're doing now so chademo really important in this whole vehicle-to-grid story that protocol unfortunately is the betamax the electro-vehicle world and it really is you know it's been they've been at it for like eight years now but actually ccs is going to be the charger like standard of the future and it's going to work to do vehicle to grid with a software standard called iso 15118 it means that it's going to be the ccs charger which is the type 2 charger pretty standard it has two other pins below two dc pins and that together is called ccs at that that combined charging standard and uh the the fifteenth nominate i mentioned that international standard it's just been released about two months ago and that's the agreed like way messaging between the car charger and maybe other bits of the energy system but what that's going to mean is that cars coming onto the market in the next 6 12 18 months are going to be equipped to do v2g and then the point you made about the charges such a such an important one right now with chademo the inversion between ac and dc needs to happen off the car it doesn't have that on board and that's why the the wall box quasar is needed its bidirectional charger has an inverter in there uses silicon carbide as that kind of switching technology the quasar itself is not massive really for what's happening in there but it is quite an expensive bit of kit because that's all happening in a charge that's hanging off the side of your house what we'll see going forward the inverter will be on the battery itself in the vehicle and as part of that vehicle's manufacture which means that uh you know a component that's gonna cost who knows four or five hundred pounds maybe on the vehicle that inversion happens on the car charger on the side of your house can be an ac charger and it needs to be able to take electricity moving in both directions way simpler than the charger that you've seen here today the wallbox quasar and hopefully that means it's going to be a lot cheaper maybe parity with what we pay for charges right now all these ac charges they're not really charges just the connection point i know for the charger that's built in the car and the power electronics conversion actually happens in there we're already seeing it in solar where you get combined inverter and battery chargers it's almost similar technology that's in the car and it's interesting the manufacturers are already starting to think in that direction we've seen some cars with vehicle to load and it allows you to to power things in your house you think the manufacturers are on board with this or is that that's almost a pun yeah for the onboard charger i love it gordon no you're right i think you know we're seeing um hyundai is a really good example so the hyundai ioniq 5 has got vehicle to load means it has three ping plug sockets in the car itself and it has an adapter that goes into that type 2 charging socket and comes out with a three pin so you can anything that you can plug in a three-pin socket that car can power right now all the conversations that we have with vehicle manufacturers is trying to understand not necessarily even are you gonna do it now we're getting beyond that it's when when will you bring the vehicles with the inverters on board the bi-directional reversion happening on the battery and when will you deploy that software that will allow us to talk to the vehicle so from our perspective at octopus we have built this service which is ready right now and we have like the whole experience and we've trialled that with our customers on this this power loop vehicle-to-grid trial so now it's a case of the cars coming and i'm really excited to see them come you know hyundai kia genesis that family of vehicles with porsche i mean appreciate you know love to have a porsche jlr vw all these brands now talking about they're going to bring this technology really soon yeah i mean because i've looked people obviously try to sell home battery systems you do a little bit of a cost comparison between stacking up 50 60 kilowatts of home battery and in nearly the price of a car or in some cases you're more than the price of a car so it's a batteries there with free seats receipts and radio and in-car entertainment and everything yeah you're right some people it just won't work for example i'm sure a lot of your audience that they're out about all day using their vans using their cars so so they're not going to be parked up at home the whole time so they may be you know they're thinking well this isn't going to work for me but actually even that overnight piece even making those big batteries available to store overnight is going to be valuable for those people again we're bringing it as part of a really cheap tariff and shifting the stuff that you do in your home that you can to the night time so it's back to that economy 7 thinking for a lot of people their car is parked up a lot of the time and they absolutely will be able to use their vehicles in this way and like you say those cars have got big batteries we said earlier you know you're not using that battery for driving about mostly why would you spend all that money on a static home battery system when you can have a car and it's a battery wheels yeah and then what are people i mean obviously people are going to sell cars and ranges but that other thing people worry about is degradation on batteries and i've been driving ev for four years i've probably experienced 10 percent degradation over four years from and the amount of energy i've had to use for four years worth of driving is enormous compared to the house is that something that people say well the car manufacturers are going to worry that you're going to degrade the battery by sucking power out of it every time that battery cycles it's doing some work and so if you think about it like when you use an engine it degrades it's going to need maintenance it's causing some kind of damage to the engine itself the great thing about batteries and this battery chemistries that battery actually likes to work within a range it likes to work within sort of 20 to 80 and it's like an s-curve it doesn't like to be drained right down to the bottom and it doesn't like to be forced to charge right up to the top it likes to be in that you know that nice bit of the s-curve and what we're starting to see from these trials and from uh from some like universities research is actually vehicle to grid is a much more gentle way of using a battery than actually driving it ironically and so we're starting to see evidence that these batteries are actually being improved by vehicle to grid it kind of conditions the battery by keeping it in that range so uh so i'm not expecting to see you know multiples of improvement of battery life but certainly no no bad effects better to flex the battery on a regular basis rather than just leaving it sat on the drive for days um yeah the f-150 lightning ford are actually looking at how you use that to power a home in some of those places in the u.s where again the grid is not as reliable so texas is a good example and of course you know what's more texan than having your massive truck carrying lumber yeah yeah loads of lumber and uh and those trucks are gonna you're gonna power those homes for maybe you know two or three days and your house was also another first when we start thinking about solar because dno is worried about that everyone's going to be sending loads of power back onto the grid in a little bit of a catch-up mode when it comes to that can you explain a bit about the the g100 that we have to do the g's the t levels the dnos these distribution network operators they're the ones that are uh you know they manage their cables from like where the energy is like stepping down from the national grid all the way down to your property or you know your home historically they've they've been maintaining that slowly expanding it where it's necessary and protecting it so making sure that energy keeps flowing and so one of the things they're really worried about is having too much energy going onto the grid at any one point that those cables are just not able to cope with when we started our project we started putting in requests to put more energy on you use something called a g99 sounds pretty dry it's pretty dry and basically the g99 application is an application which says i would like to export more than 3.68 kilowatts and actually that application goes all the way up so it's the same application as you know building some new like solar farm or power station as it is for domestic application above 3.68 and actually below that is g98 so again some of your viewers might be doing solar installations the g98 says if you're connecting 3.68 kilowatt or less then you can notify us after you've connected because it's low enough that we can cope with that we're not too worried above that they want you to notify them before you connect g99 gives you that so that was a big learning on the trial we work with uk pm they were one of our project partners and we worked with them to make that a lot easier for installers and make the journey a lot smoother it still requires someone at uk pn or any of the dns to actually go through your application and check okay what's the equipment you want to like export using and what's happening in your local area how much you know can their local literary grid network cope with in terms of export and the g99 gives you an answer back it's either yeah you can connect that and that's fine no other requirement yes you can connect but we're going to give you a limit we're going to ask you to limit the amount of export because your local area is already quite constrained maybe or like your neighbors might have a lot of solar already you might already have solar um or or the third one might be actually that like we just can't do it in your area that actually there's too much there's too much you know already happening here and if you want to pay you can pay to upgrade the grid near you which is pretty harsh if you're an early adopter because you're going to pick up the bill potentially for you and all your neighbours to have the grid upgraded and most people will say well no thanks because it's a big bill in fact you know we had some customers that were 10 12 15 000 pounds which is a huge amount of money we even had one that was a hundred thousand pounds because they'd have to have a whole road up that's just not realistic for most people but for the customers who uh so for those customers i should say you know the dns are looking at this slowly but surely be patient they're coming um thinking about how you help customers so that it isn't one person having to pay because this is not really fair so g100 is about limiting the export and it's a requirement to basically yeah protect the grid by dropping some of that export down and so what we wanted to prove was that it is possible in a domestic setting to reduce the amount of export that we keep below a limit and that we could apply that to lots of different homes who might have different amounts of solar plus vitage so what we did was work with a specialist partner g99 consultants to actually design a unit which fits somewhere near your distribution board which takes the input from the vtg so literally taking those inputs from the vtg charger coming back through your home and putting this device before your smart meter so it's all happening in the home itself and and comparing that to the solar coming in as well and then setting each of those units so that they had the right level to meet what the dna had allowed for that property and so what we showed is that for those few occasions when it is sunny enough for their solar to be generating enough and the vgg was also exporting and the home wasn't using enough energy so we hit the limit that device turned off the solar inverter to make sure that we always stay below that export limit yeah and there's going to be a change i think for the dno as well and i think they're going to even transition to being digital distribution service operators yeah and they're kind of because from the ones i've talked to they're kind of quite reluctant to do major upgrades to support the ev rollout and yet you're offering them a kind of way out of it in terms of getting energy back in so they can possibly mitigate some of those upgrades but the minute they're not very it's either an on or off isn't it it's either you can go to 10 kilowatts or 8 kilowatts if you go above that you can't but they're not really reflecting the real-time demand in the area at the moment it's very it's a really good observation yeah fixed very fixed i think you're right um yeah the so the dnas are on their own journey to becoming these service uh service providers and thinking more about customers i think that's the thing that we've experienced on our project and working with ukpn and actually working with the ena the energy network association who bring all of those dnos together actually explaining it from the customer's perspective has been really powerful to help them understand what they need to do what they need to improve so on the project we uh for example work with uk pn to explain you know installers are going to come in number right you're going to be asking for the g99 connections for v2g for battery bigger solar they're going to be getting more and more of these requests and actually they've rolled out something called smart connect a much nicer experience on a website we can go on put your application in it's much more straightforward so we want to see more of that completed the project what's the what's the feedback been by the other participants is it something they're all delighted and ready for the future or is it has it been a challenging world for them to live in well i think a bit of both to be honest um it's an innovation trial and as we were looking for for people to join our trial we were really honest about saying this is innovation it's gonna be messy it might always work but we will work closely with you to help you and support you through this project and make sure that you know your car is charged and you know we look after you all the way through so uh we're we're soon going to release some of our reports actually so we're going to release a report we did with the energy savings trust who are one of our project partners talking about what it felt like to be a customer on the trial so that's coming really soon so keep an eye out for that and actually you know the overwhelming feedback is yes there were bumpy moments but we really like doing v2g now what we really know is the pros humour yeah so yeah the producer and consumer there's a tiny bit in the wiring regulations that hints to the future but you've already delivered the future we've seen it here everything's still here everything seems to work normally i'm sure the efix viewers are going to look forward to seeing more of this uh if you're watching this you got to this stage check out this video here we went a little bit further on the g100 g98 g99 with the guy who's delivered the project
2022-08-09 15:18
