Are electric vehicles the key to unleashing renewable energy?

Can the electrification of transportation be the key to 100% renewable energy and decarbonizing the global economy?

This is an idea that I have been thinking about since I purchased my first electric car. What struck me after having my home charger installed and regularly plugging in this vehicle was the huge amount of stored energy sitting on my driveway.

There are a lot of negative stories in the press about how the adoption of electric vehicles will lead to a collapse of the electricity system. The argument is that the local grid infrastructure cannot handle a situation where a whole street of electric vehicles all arrive home and start charging simultaneously. This scenario could be true but assumes no development of local infrastructure such as upgrading the local grid, implementing demand control and installing smart meters. So far we have seen no pictures of darkened streets where EVs have collapsed the power system.

What I would encourage you to do is to look at this phenomenon from a different perspective. Think about a future where every car in every driveway is capable of powering the neighbouring houses.

Modern electric cars have battery capacities of 50+kWh compared to the average UK household which uses 10kWh of power per day. Combine this with the fact that the average car spends 90% of its life stationary, therefore, each electric car is a very valuable unutilised asset that can provide electricity storage.

This can all happen without affecting the ability of the car to provide transport for the owner: in the UK the average daily mileage is only around 20 miles (or 30km) whilst the average vehicle range is 200+km.

The world is looking for solutions to move towards renewable energy and although renewable energy sources like wind and solar are now the cheapest form of power generation they have a problem: the intermittency of the power. Intermittency in this context means that you are not able to control when this power is generated. You can curtail or reduce power production from these sources but you cannot generate more than the conditions allow.

The current solutions to this are backup power plants including nuclear, gas, coal and diesel generators, or grid-scale energy storage. All of these solutions have cost or environmental impacts which we need to overcome.

Pumped hydropower is a really good solution for large scale storage and grid stabilisation and it can also generate power but is a 60 to 80-year investment and requires rivers and the right topography. It also faces challenges due to the impact on the land taken to create the reservoirs which can be inhabited or often environmentally sensitive locations.

Grid-scale storage can be achieved through a number of methods including grid-scale battery facilities or other novel storage technologies which store power through cryogenics, heat storage or gravity. The problem with these systems is that they do not generate electricity and so only provide storage. As a result, they are a pure cost to the electricity system and today are all prohibitively expensive compared to the alternative of burning fossil fuels or overbuilding renewable generation and curtailing output when demand is lower.

The hypothesis which I present is that electric vehicles could be the best solution. The technology for implementing V2G (Vehicle-to-grid) is available today.

If we use the UK as an example (which has 37 million cars, light goods vehicles and motorcycles as of March 2021) and assume vehicle battery averages of the latest EV’s on the market, this fleet could easily represent over 2TWh of storage. (2TWh = 2 billion kWh).

The UK power grid produces 5.5TWh per day, so you can see it is easily possible that 30%+ of total daily UK electricity could be stored and made available through a well developed V2G system. My belief is that this technology combined with Wind, Solar, Nuclear, Hydro and Geothermal generation could be the key to unlocking a completely decarbonised electricity supply for every country. In addition, the storage would be dual-use (transport and energy storage) and provided by the vehicle owners.

Using vehicles to store power also has the added benefit that it is a truly distributed system where the storage physically moves with the power demand. You would effectively take your energy backup system to work with you during the day into a city for example, and then back out to the suburbs at night to support your home. This reduces the cost of the transmission systems compared to centralised storage solutions.

So as you can see, the idea of using electric cars for electricity storage and grid stabilisation can become a reality. Currently, the market for V2G is in its infancy, but the companies which manage to solve the technical, and more importantly consumer challenges, will be the leaders in an incredible market opportunity. This transformation will revolutionise the way our global electricity markets work. This system is also very well suited to pairing with blockchain systems, which have arrived with the advent of cryptocurrency, to make every vehicle owner a mini utility company buying and selling power dynamically in a distributed manner.

I am very excited to see how this sector evolves in the coming years and I would love to hear your views so please comment below!