With the uptake of electric vehicles (EVs) predicted to rise significantly in the near future; this article considers how the infrastructure required to meet this extra demand for power, actually unlocks opportunities and benefits our region.
In the last article we looked at the three main types of EV charging stations.
But a new fourth kind of charger that allows an EV to be used as a giant home battery is also starting to become available in Australia.
Unlike standard one-way EV chargers, these bidirectional chargers can also discharge energy from an EV, which means your car can be used to power your home and its appliances, or to export energy to the grid.
Light bulb moment?!
Current EVs generally have three to four times the capacity of a home battery.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics shows most cars spend most of their time parked at home or work and on average people only travel about 35 kilometres a day - roughly a 10th of the range of an EV.
So, if we’re not regularly doing the long haul over the hill or down the Ocean Road, that leaves a significant amount of energy that can be drawn upon to power a house or assist the network.
An EV battery typically stores enough energy to power an average household for up to three days.
So, in an ideal situation, excess power in the grid (at times of low demand) would charge EV‘s as tariffs are also at their lowest. Then some of the excess power from the EV would then be made available to the grid during those periods of high demand.
While there are currently only a limited number of vehicles offered in Australia that have this bidirectional charging capability called V2G (Nissan Leaf and the Mitsubishi plug-in hybrids with Volkswagen introducing this option late 2022), it is expected V2G will become standard in Australia by 2025.
There’s an estimated 19 million vehicles ‘Down Under’, if they were all EVs, this would be equivalent to around a terawatt of power (1,000 million kW’s)! Approximately 30,000 EVs have been sold in Australia but watch this space.
That said, the rollout of EV charging stations in Apollo Bay will have its challenges.
The consultant, Enhar, who looked into this solution for us, says the network in our area is constrained in terms of how much energy could be provided by Powercor for these charging stations and it’s highly likely the network would need significant upgrades to meet our EV future.
Safe to say it’s not going to happen overnight but it’s not impossible and it’s great to know what we need to do to make it happen.
