Vehicle-to-grid chargepoints can improve battery life in electric vehicles and reduce carbon emissions and costs of charging, a government-funded project has found.
Research from the EV-elocity project shows that, by careful charging and discharging, EV battery degradation can reduce by one-eighth, and, in some situations, up to 450 kg of emitted carbon dioxide (CO2) or £400 could be saved per vehicle each year.
Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) can balance the calendar and cycling aging (both of which affect the rate of battery degradation) to optimise the battery condition and improve its health by 8.6 – 12.3% over one-year’s operation, compared to conventional charging alone – equivalent to one extra year of use.
In cost-terms, V2G tariff optimisation can save around £100 per year per chargepoint on normal business electricity tariffs, with up to £400 saved on a smarter tariff.
If managed to maximise the environmental benefit, nearly half a tonne of annual CO2 emissions can be saved, and significant savings (over 180 kg) can be made even when reducing cost is the main goal.
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Chris Rimmer, Infrastructure Strategy lead at Cenex and the project’s lead project manager, said, “Our conclusions show that it is not necessary to trade-off financial, environmental and asset lifetimes when charging Electric Vehicles. Cost, carbon, and conditioning benefits can all be gained when V2G is used intelligently with fleet vehicles.” |
The EV-elocity project is part of the Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) competition, funded by the Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and the Office for Low Emission Vehicles (OLEV), in partnership with Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation which was earmarked £30M to develop ideas. |
Professor Lucelia Rodrigues of the University of Nottingham added, “A key challenge for an optimum application of V2G technology is to synchronize the needs and requirements of the users and the energy and transport systems.
“Our work correlated variables such as user needs, mobility patterns and renewable electricity generation to evolve different possible scenarios for the application of V2G chargers, with a view of maximizing local renewable energy consumption, lowering costs for the user, improving battery life and reducing carbon emissions from the whole system.”
Experimental research highlighted the potential to extend battery life by exploiting the unique capability of V2G chargers to both charge and discharge the vehicle battery, commented Professor James Marco of Warwick Manufacturing Group.
“By careful optimisation of this process and knowing how the battery performance may degrade over time, it is possible to condition the battery to extend its life in a number if situations when compared to conventional methods of vehicle charging.”
