Electric vehicles will become a key asset for the Australia’s energy market operator to manage the grid, and could even make home batteries redundant in the long-term, an industry insider has claimed.
Tim Washington, the founder and CEO of Jet Charge, which has installed thousands of charging stations in homes and businesses, says vehicle-to-home (V2H) and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technologies could kill the market for household energy storage in the not-too distant future.
“Bi-directional charging though EVs will spell the end of residential storage as we know it … it will completely displace it,” Washington told the Electric Vehicle Transition conference co-hosted by The Driven and RenewEconomy in August.
“By 2024, every (electric) vehicle coming out to the market will be (V2H and V2G) capable. It’s just a question of whether you use it.”
Washington notes that forecasts for EVs of around 100,000 a year added to Australian roads by 2024, with an average battery size of at least 40kWh, would bring into play some 4GWh of storage each year.
Which means that EVs, when not being used – which is the vast majority of the time – could become a grid asset, or soak up excess solar from the home and then power it at night.
“Cars will be an energy asset first, a mobility asset second.” Washington said. “That’s why electric cars will change how we view cars. And energy.”
With respect to the CEO of Jet Charge this is not exactly a new observation. Amory Lovins writes extensively about “distributed storage” in the future using parked electric vehicles in his ground-breaking book “Reinventing Fire” way back in 2011. Cheers, LC.