Tag Archives: V2G

Vehicle to Grid technology.

The Nissan LEAF – Now Built In Britain

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The very first British built LEAF electric vehicle has recently rolled off the production line at Nissan’s plant in Sunderland. British Prime Minister David Cameron was there to celebrate the event, as were some cameras. Here’s what one of them recorded:

Commenting on Nissan’s £420 million investment Mr. Cameron said that:

This plant, all of the people who work here, the cars being produced behind me, are the best possible rebuke to those who say “In Britain we can’t design things any more, we can’t make things any more or we can’t export things any more. You’ve shown here at Nissan in Sunderland that we can, and we can do it brilliantly.

As the reporter points out:

The new LEAF boasts over 100 improvements and uses an advanced lithium-ion battery, which is also manufactured at the Sunderland plant. Updates include an increased driving range of 123 miles or 199 km, and the ability to recharge in half the time of the first generation LEAF.

 

More than 54,000 LEAFs have been sold worldwide. Nissan says the new LEAF is the first in a number of pure electric vehicles that it plans to launch over the next few years.

Unfortunately no mention was made of the “vehicle to home” technology that Nissan have been trialling back home in Japan, let alone fully fledged V2G. Maybe Mr. Cameron will announce some significant Great British investments in the design of such esoteric devices in the near future?

The “Largest Single Electric Vehicle Order Ever” Includes Vehicle to Grid Technology!

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Forbes columnist Tom Konrad is evidently better at reading Chinese than I am, and he reports that:

The city of Hangzhou just signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Kandi Technologies and nine other companies to supply 20,000 electric vehicles (EVs) for the city’s “pilot” EV leasing program.

This news is of great interest to us here at V2G Limited because not only that, but also:

Other companies involved will supply the batteries (Air Lithium (Lyoyang) Co. Ltd.) and charging by the local utility.  The utility will fund construction of a charging and battery swap station network as well as paying for the batteries.

 

The batteries will serve a dual use for grid stabilization, or Vehicle to Grid (V2G) technology.  The batteries will be financed by charges to electricity customers because of this dual use.  So, in addition to this being the largest EV sale ever announced, the project is also effectively the largest scale trial of the use of EV batteries for V2G.

The comments on the story clarify that:

The greedy utilities don’t want to share [the] value with consumers – that’s the only problem with V2G.

To that I would add the rider that (over here in Europe at least) V2G technology isn’t ready for “prime-time” just yet for another reason. The standards are still being developed apart from anything else.

Note that at the end of his report Tom also discloses that he is:

Long NASD:KNDI

Europe’s PowerUp Project Delivers V2G Interface Documentation

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The EU funded PowerUp project has just released a set of documents, still labelled “Confidential”, but also “Final” and “Public”! According to the European Union’s web site:

PowerUp aims to develop the Vehicle-2-Grid (V2G) interface, involving a full development cycle of physical/link-layer specification, charging control protocol design, prototyping, conformance testing, field trials, and standardisation. Its results will ensure that FEVs smoothly integrate into emerging smart-grid networks. Thereby the efficiencies resulting from robust grid operation may be achieved; V2G capabilities will smoothen the daily fluctuation of electricity demand and will enable FEVs to act as emergency energy supplies. To achieve these desired results, it is essential that any electric vehicle type would be compatible with any European smart-grid network.

 

V2G technology will be developed in liaison with the ongoing ISO/IEC standardisation of the V2G interface, and it will extend existing smart-metering standards and ETSI ITS standards for vehicular communications. On the grid side, smart electric meters will be enhanced for V2G capability and V2G-specific demand-balancing control algorithms will be researched.

The documents delivered this week can be downloaded from the PowerUp home page.  To give you a feel of what is contained therein, here’s an extract from the introduction to deliverable 4.1:

The PowerUp project aims at developing and validating the V2G interface, so as to support nomadic electricity consumption by electric vehicles under any foreseen arrangement of the billing architecture or value chains. The PowerUp use cases, which can be handled by the envisaged architecture, are stated below:

 

A) Basic V2G set up (commercial heavy vehicle)
B) Basic V2G setup (passenger car) in semiprivate area
C) Power delivery re-negotiation
D) Grid-controlled scheduling and re-scheduling of charging
E) Power failure handling
F) User initiated re-scheduling
G) High speed data exchange with the EV over PLC
H) Vehicle to grid transfer of energy

According to the rather sparse “Events” section of the PowerUp  web site:

Our up-to-date V2G interface prototypes will be demonstrated at the EC stand and at the Denso stand at the 2012 ITS World Congress in Vienna.

The Intelligent Transport Systems World Congress takes place between October 22nd and 26th at the Messezentrum Wien in Vienna. Perhaps we’ll see you there?

California and DoD Commit $3.75 million to Explore V2G at Los Angeles Air Force Base

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Last year the US Office of Science and Technology Policy announced that:

Air Force officials unveiled a plan to establish Los Angeles Air Force Base as the first Federal facility to replace 100% of its general-purpose fleet with Plug-in Electric Vehicles (PEV’s). This is the start of a broader Department of Defense (DoD) effort toward large-scale integration of PEV’s into its fleet. Lessons learned from this project will help DoD and other agencies understand operational implications of fleet electrification, while demonstrating cutting-edge PEV technologies, such as vehicle-to-grid (V2G) systems.

Yesterday the California Energy Commission announced that it had:

Unanimously approved funding of more than $15 million to projects that will advance biofuels and electric vehicle research in California.

Amongst other EV projects, some of the funding goes to:

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in Berkeley, [which] will receive $1 million as match funding for a $3.75 million project to demonstrate vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology for an all-electric heavy duty non-tactical vehicle fleet at Los Angeles Air Force Base. The fleet vehicles will be used to explore the revenue-generating capability of V2G technology by participating in the California’s electricity markets, where the vehicles can at different times charge from the grid and also discharge energy into the grid to meet demand. The Department of Defense is providing $2.75 million for the project at the lab, which is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy.

I wonder how much this pilot project will assist the US Navy in avoiding rolling blackouts in California as the summer heats up?

State energy officials say Southern California could be hit by rotating blackouts this summer if a heat wave hits while San Onofre‘s twin reactors remain dark.