On your website, you mention “NOTE that if you’re looking for a way to charge your EV with clean cheap electricity, the GivEnergy EV charger is for you! Just be aware that it doesn’t yet support bidirectional charging” - the wording implies there might be either an update to the product or a new bidirectional charger made available at some point? Any news on that, since enphase say theirs will be available in the new year for the UK, and I’d like one to integrate a VW ID4 into my home system.
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Excellent question. I’ve been researching the likely coming options for EV’s with Vehicle to House (V2H) and Vehicle to Grid (V2G) capability (there aren’t many yet). But whenever they do come, the charger (and I believe the inverter) needs to be capable. So it would be good to know GivEnergy’s plans.
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Excellent question. Here we all are talking about our 5/8/10kWh battery storage at home, when there is potentially a 60/80/100kWh battery sat on the driveway.
If grid-facing AC inverters and chargers came with plug-and-play bi-directional charging, so that you could fill up your EV with cheap surplus energy at night and export some during the evening peak eg when your day is done, it would not only be a hugely popular arbitrage capability but it would also help persuade people (me) to make the next car purchase an EV.
Surely this would be pretty simple to do technically, since we are already importing and exporting in this fashion on intelligent tariffs like IOG and IOF. What are the barriers to overcome, and is simple bidirectional EV charging on the way soon?
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From what I have read there are three challenges:
- technical; the need to sync the car DC output with the AC grid frequency
- impact on the car battery; repeated charges and discharges of the car battery could affect the battery longevity, will the car manufacturers take that risk?
- standards; necessary government standards for V2G are still work in progress
These are all solvable, just take time
Personally I believe V2G will come and when it does it will make home storage batteries a thing of the past. So perhaps that’s another reason why it’s not coming quickly?
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Not such a technical challenge for people whose job it is to make dc-ac inverters then, and surely it is the owner’s decision to put their EV battery through extra cycling when grid conditions make it favourable. But yes, prospectively making intelligent home batteries redundant.
But red tape!? A development which would go a long way to helping ease the problems caused by renewable generation glut-famine cycles. We can already see the benefit of demand smoothing from flexible tariffs and home batteries, bi-directional EV charging would make a genuine improvement to national energy security. Approaching a million EV households able to donate 2-3kW per hour for up to 4 hours is the equivalent of building a Sizewell C. Now not in 15 years time. No brainer.
And why might V2G red tape be holding back V2H, eg bi-directing through an existing intelligent inverter/battery setup?
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I agree, V2G, especially when operated at scale a-la Octopus Intelligent Flux / Go is potentially a major game changer in the electrification journey
except:
don’t agree with this point, cars typically come with X years battery warranty to encourage the takeup of EV’s, managing the battery for grid supply purposes shifts the battery risk onto the car manufacturer, and I’ve heard that’s part of the industry reluctance
you might note in the terms and conditions for our GivEnergy batteries which have an unlimited cycle warranty that this doesn’t apply if you’re using the battery for grid trading. So presumably things like GivBack will void this part of the warranty?
Anyway, its all solvable, and things like warranty carve-outs like GivEnergy have done are one way to reduce this risk for the manufacturer
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