The £200k grant has been awarded to a consortium of partners: Fuuse, TPS, Gridicity and PNDC. The consortium will develop new vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technology, that enables electric vehicles to provide services to National Grid or give energy back at specified locations to aid the rising pressures on energy demand.
End-to-end V2X allows EV chargers to enable an uptake of energy within an electric vehicle to help assist in combatting the rising energy demand in areas around the UK. Essentially, V2X is enabling electric vehicles to be utilised as batteries that can charge, store, and return energy when needed, based on energy forecasting and a fleet’s priorities and trends. We hope to put theory into practice and show that EVs be used as mobile batteries.
TPS (Turbo Power Systems) are providing essential hardware to enable maximum efficiency of the solution, whilst fleet electrification specialists, Gridicity, join the consortium to produce smart intelligent forecasting of energy demand and supply. Fuuse software will collate these insights and determine where to distribute the energy most efficiently within an organisation and the grid. Powering the crucial testbed of this project is PNDC (Power Network Distribution Centre), based at the University of Strathclyde.
“Knowing when EV charging demand and other building demand is expected allows for intelligent microgrid-like capabilities on the sites of fleet customers for the day ahead. The V2X solution we are working on as a consortium will be of benefit to customer sites, making the most of energy tariffs, local energy generation and offering grid services. We are pooling expertise to operationalise the potential of V2X technology.”
Alicia Blatiak, CEO and Founder of Gridicity
“As momentum for EV uptake accelerates and more pressure mounts on fleets to make the transition, we must focus our efforts on resilience, for not only organisation sites, but the wider Grid. We must enable fleets to transition as responsibly and efficiently as possible.
This project is another step toward organisations becoming self sufficient when it comes to their site energy infrastructure. Fleets who can harness and redistribute their EV battery energy where it is most needed will not only reap operational and financial rewards but become a key player to providing the support the UK will need in its EV rollout goals.”
Dr Will Maden, COO of Fuuse
“With the challenges presented by the electricity distribution network capacity to deploying wide-scale electric vehicle fleets, V2X will undoubtably play a role in addressing this and unlocking the full potential of EVs.
Deployed in our Velox chargers, V2X will provide resilient and flexible charging solutions for our customers enabling transfer of power not just to the vehicle but from the vehicle to supply local premises, the grid, battery storage and even other vehicles.”
Nigel Jakeman, Engineering & Business Development Director at TPS
“V2X technologies hold great potential to provide value to their owners and to the wider energy networks. The ‘V2X Local Network Fleet Solution’ solution represents an exciting development of V2X technology that unlocks the full storage potential of EV batteries and delivers benefits from DC-to-DC power exchange efficiencies with other local energy resources. The PNDC is delighted to be able to support this by project by testing the full integrated solution within our smart grid test lab.”
Ryan Sims, Lead R&D Engineer from PNDC
The grant funding is awarded as part of the UK government’s V2X Innovation Programme, part of a wider Flexible Innovation Programme to deliver a range of smart energy applications.
This phase of the project aims to test the concept in a controlled environment. Future developments will include real world testing with forward thinking fleets.