Monthly Archives: October 2018

Nissan, Kyushu Electric and ELEX Announce V2B Pilot Project

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The following is based on Google’s translation of a Nissan press release currently only available in the original Japanese. Please forgive any inadvertent errors or omissions on my part!

Kyushu Electric Power Company Ltd., ELEX Corporation and Nissan Motor Company Ltd. have announced a pilot V2B project for corporate customers:

In January 2019 we will jointly start a V2B (Vehicle-to-Building) pilot project to reduce maximum power demand:

Nissan-Kyushu-01

In this project, we will provide a Nissan LEAF and bi-directional charging station to corporate customers in order to verify the effects of reducing customer’s demand by utilizing the electricity stored in electric vehicles batteries, and also use by the customer as an emergency power source.

Through this project, each company aims to acquire knowledge regarding the creation of new services utilizing EVs, and we will also consider future commercialization.

It looks as though peak shaving is the name of the game:

Nissan-Kyushu-02

Please watch this space for any further English language news about the project.

Nissan LEAF V2G Qualifies as a “Power Station” in Germany

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In a press release earlier today Nissan proudly announced that:

An important milestone on the road to emission-free energy and mobility has been achieved by technology company The Mobility House, energy supplier ENERVIE, transmission system operator Amprion and car maker Nissan. With the Nissan Leaf and an innovative charging and energy management technology, the project partners have now succeeded in qualifying an electric car for all the TSO regulatory requirements for primary power regulation. This means that the car can be integrated as a regulating reserve for the German electricity grid – a breakthrough in the establishment of Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) technology in Germany.

For some strange reason Nissan don’t mention the manufacturer of the V2G capable electric vehicle charging station displayed in their publicity pictures:

Nissan LEAF

Nissan 2018 LEAF and EVTEC V2G charging station

Those pretty white boxes look a lot like the EVTEC units we have mentioned previously here on the V2G UK blog. Nissan’s press release continues:

To meet the universal desire for a transition to decentralised energy generation from renewable sources here in Germany, new and innovative solutions for stabilising the electricity grid are necessary. The increasing use of renewable energy leads to fluctuations in the grid, which must be initially balanced by primary regulation, able to prevent impending power cuts at a second’s notice.

Electric cars such as the Nissan Leaf, with integrated bidirectional charging technology, could play an important part in this. With its CHAdeMO charging connector, the Leaf is able not only to extract power from the grid and store it in its traction battery, but, if necessary, also to feed power back. This is called the Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) concept.

As luck would have it here at V2G UK we are very familiar with the V2G concept and CHAdeMO connectors. In fact our V2G EVSE subsidiary has recently received an Office for Low Emission Vehicles (OLEV for short) grant to assess the feasibility of using such technology on the streets of Plymouth, Exeter and Falmouth in order to provide flexibility services to Western Power Distribution’s electricity grid over here, and thereby defer expensive reinforcement of South West England’s distribution grid. Here’s a close up of the Vehicle-to-Grid Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment for (V2G EVSE for short) in ENERVIE‘s car park over in Hagen:

Nissan LEAF

EVTEC Vehicle-to-Grid capable charging station

whilst here’s our concept for the inner city streets of Devon and Cornwall, Urban Electric‘s UEone “pop up” charging post:

UEone-Concept

According to Guillaume Pelletreau, the Vice President and Managing Director of Nissan Center Europe:

We strongly believe in an emission-free future. Accordingly, we are also very proud that the Nissan Leaf has, as the first electric car ever, been approved as suitable for stabilising grid frequencies. LEAF batteries could make an important contribution to energy transition in Germany and a sustainable future.

Nissan LEAF

Nissan LEAF in ENERVIE’s car park in Hagen

Here at V2G UK we strongly believe that Nissan LEAF traction batteries could make an important contribution to the energy transition and a sustainable future here in the United Kingdom.

Wallbox Announces the “First ever DC charger for the home”

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I don’t recall ever being quite so excited reading a press release. I’m afraid I’ve been far too busy here in the UK to travel to China this week to work on EV charging station standards, as I originally planned a few months ago. I’m still far too busy even to travel to the eMove360° conference and trade fair in Munich today. Which is something of a pity since I’d like to take a very close look at this device in the flesh, so to speak:

DC-Wallbox

The Wallbox press release I’ve recently been reading contains a few interesting pieces of background information for we V2G watchers here in the UK, such as:

Research, technical development, product testing and manufacturing take place in Barcelona, where Wallbox has strong engineering resource and capacity to produce 100,000 chargers per year.

The company is Spanish but the brand is international. Wallbox operations are solely conducted in English. It began UK operations in September 2018.

not to mention:

Wallbox operates in 30 markets around Europe and overseas as far as New Zealand and China. Wallbox is partner to major automotive OEMs and energy companies. The company is approaching 20,000 installations across all markets and sees the UK as one of its most important growth opportunities. The company is 80-strong and growing, with over half of the workforce involved in software and hardware development. Many employees have made the transition from IT to automotive, coming from the likes of Apple and Tesla, which in part accounts for the unique design quality.

Moving on to Wallbox’s shiny new black box pictured above, let’s take a look at the basic specification first. According to the press release:

All Wallbox chargers are rated up to 22 kW, suitable for domestic and commercial installation and connect to the myWallbox energy management platform. This enables scheduling to take advantage of time and use tariffs, energy balancing between vehicle and the home, and a host of other easily accessible features. Wallbox chargers have connectivity through WiFi, Ethernet or Bluetooth.

Presumably that 22 kW applies to the DC black box as well in which case it can handle three phase, and if the entire Wallbox range can connect to an energy management system (EMS for short) somewhere in the clouds I’d like to take a very close look at all the other AC boxes as well! Sticking with DC for now though:

The new DC charger puts energy created and stored in the home, straight into the electric vehicle through a CCS or ChaDeMo connector. Home generation and storage are now becoming much more cost effective considerations as electric vehicle range and battery size increase and reduce ROI timescales.

The charger’s unique bi-directional power electronics reconcile the alternating (AC) and direct (DC) energy that flows between vehicle charging, rooftop PV generation or garden wind turbines, and home battery storage.

Wallbox are talking just the sort of language we like to hear when discussing our “Static & Mobile Distributed Energy Storage” (SaMDES) project, and they have even uttered the magic words “bi-directional power electronics”. This sounds like pukka vehicle-to-home capable kit, so the next obvious question from our North Cornwall perspective is “when will it start shipping to the UK?”

First sales are planned for mid 2019

A minor disappointment there then, but yesterday I did manage to speak at length with Stewart Mckee who is Director of Wallbox UK. He assures me that the black box on display in Munich today isn’t just an empty shell. It is in fact “production ready”. That being the case I cannot wait to experiment with plugging one into the CHAdeMO connector at the front of one of Nissan’s new 40 kWh e-NV200 vans, which we test drove for three days following the recent Cornwall New Energy EV event in Wadebridge:

2018-09-21_11-45-21_174

As if all that wasn’t exciting enough there’s more where that came from!

Wallbox is also making it easier to manage electric vehicle charging at home. The company is introducing software that allows spoken commands, and cognitive intelligence that learns about an owner’s charging behaviour and preferences, in order to predict optimum energy balance with home and grid.

This unique two-tier combination of software technologies means that you can speak directly to your home charging system and it will interpret your requirements in the most energy efficient manner. For instance, you can simply say: ‘I need my car fully charged for the morning’ and Wallbox will take care of the rest, with consideration for all other home energy demands during the same period of charging.

The ability for Wallbox software to automatically manage charging in this way adds another smart layer to dynamic load balancing between between vehicle and the home, and vehicles parked in the same area.

Please forgive me, but after all that excitement I need to go and lie down now. However make sure to watch this space, because we’re hoping to have a chat with Wallbox’s CEO Enric Asunción real soon now.