GARAGE SALES
Japanese electric vans, Italian charging equipment, and American IT are coming together to make commercial vehicle-to-grid systems for regulation of grid frequency a Danish reality with global perspectives
Think of a future in which millions of batteries are charged from the electricity mains to provide demand response services when the grid requires them. That future has been brought nearer by a project in Copenhagen, where a local utility has signed the world’s first commercial vehicle-to-grid (V2G) agreement.
“After some teething problems, the system works really well. We are now in the process of selling frequency regulation to the electricity grid,” says operations manager Martin Messer Thomsen at Nuvve, an IT company. Nuvve’s software optimises the purchase and sale of services to the grid.
Suburban utility Frederiksberg Forsyning supplies gas, water, and district cooling and heating to the residents of Frederiksberg, an inner city suburb. To provide the various services, it operates a fleet of vehicles, including ten electric vans. These are charged using custom charging equipment supplied by major Italian energy company Enel. The equipment can deliver 10 kW in both directions.
When the electric cars are parked in the utility’s garage with their ten batteries fully charged, 100 kW of power is available. The little fleet’s energy is sold to the grid by Neas Energy, an energy trading firm, which bids it into the Danish-Swedish market for frequency regulation. The market is operated by the national transmission system operators (TSOs), Energinet.dk and Svenska Kraftnät, which continually signal their need for power to maintain grid frequency at 50 hertz. Where the power comes from is immaterial to the TSO, provided the price is right.
“We are seeing an enormous interest in the idea,” says Thomsen. “From an economic perspective, it’s interesting for fleet owners to view their vehicles as revenue-earning assets, even when they are parked.”
It is still too early to say how much revenue the sale of frequency regulation will return and Nuvve has too few customers to declare the software off-the-shelf. Research by the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) suggests earnings from sale of frequency regulation may amount to about €1350 annually per car. DTU’s Peter Bach Andersen says the calculations assume that electric vehicles are plugged in and available to the grid between 16:00 and 06:00 and can both charge and release energy. He stresses that for EVs to provide useful volumes of frequency regulation requires aggregating the capacity of many before they can function as a virtual power plant.
NEXT STOP BRITAIN
The collaboration between vehicle supplier Nissan, Enel, and Nuvve is betting on the Netherlands and the UK as the next markets. “Britain can lead the way in V2G. The grid is not as strong as in Denmark and Germany and the British need to integrate more renewable energy. This creates a need for frequency regulation, so we are seeing great interest,” says Thomsen.
The newest EVs from Nissan can all provide services to the grid without technical modifications and come with an eight year warranty. Experience shows that electric car batteries wear relatively little, especially if they are not allowed to discharge completely too often. For this reason, the project partners in Frederiksberg have placed limits on how far a battery can discharge. •
TEXT Jesper Tornbjerg