How the national grid could pay you to get power from your electric car Business

In a particularly cruel twist of fate, 2021 was not only the year that gas prices soared, but also the year that the wind did not blow.

As the breezes fell at their slowest speed in 60 years, Britain was forced to switch on ‘dirty’ coal-fired power stations and new questions were raised about the inherently less reliable renewable energy sources .

Still, some energy experts say they have the answer, and it just might be right up your alley.

The crux of the problem is simple. Taken together, wind farms across the UK can already produce a staggering 12 gigawatts of power – and that’s set to quadruple by 2030.

But turbines don’t always spin when we need them, which means there are times when energy is actually wasted.

The solution is to consume or store this energy when it is not needed – for example at night – and deploy it when demand returns.

Battery storage sites are likely to be a key part of our future power grid, but now the national grid, along with home energy provider Octopus, plans to supplement this with power directly from the batteries. electric vehicles.

As more and more of us drive electric cars, the operator plans to draw power from them while they sit on UK driveways.

By connecting them to the grid, experts believe they could save billions of pounds that would otherwise be needed in new energy infrastructure.

Scheduling them to charge overnight would help reduce the strain on the network during the busiest hours, usually around tea time.

But perhaps more importantly, they can also help mitigate demand shocks by feeding electricity back into the grid when it’s needed most. A special type of electric car charger that can drain power from a car rather than just distribute it makes such a scenario possible.

According to Octopus Energy, which is testing this “vehicle-to-grid technology,” a typical electric car has an output of seven kilowatt hours, and most peak-hour households only need about three kilowatt hours. That means each car could have about four kilowatt hours to spare.