Dutch entrepreneur Robin Berg has installed the first bidirectional charging station for electric cars in the Lombok district of the city of Utrecht district, Netherlands.
The station, according to the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, is one of the first 50 points in the Netherlands where electric cars can charge and deliver electricity back to the grid. The parked car’s battery is charged when energy is cheap and discharges back into the grid when grid demand peaks.
The power remains in the battery if the car user indicates via an app that they want to make another trip. Berg aims to roll out the bidirectional charging station across the Netherlands to balance the overloaded electricity grid.
The 50 bidirectional charging EVs have been launched by national carsharing company MyWheels and We Drive Solar, a sustainable EV solutions company. As recently reported by Electrive, an electric charging infrastructure website in the Netherlands, around 500 vehicles are planned to eventually use the public chargers.
Currently, the start is now with 50 units of the Renault 5 E-Tech electric, according the website of Renault Group. These cars, available through car sharing service MyWheels, use V2G bidirectional charging technology developed by Mobilize, the Renault Group brand that focuses on new mobility. This is the first time that this technology has been used for the benefit of public infrastructure.
We Drive Solar is not a free-flowing, pick-up-by-app-and-drop-where-you-want service. Cars have dedicated parking spots. Subscribers reserve their vehicles, pick them up and drop them off in the same place, and drive them wherever they like.
Berg, founder and chief executive of We Drive Solar, is quoted as saying that moving from small-scale tests and pilot schemes to large-scale deployment is the plan. One car might be enough for a neighbourhood but not to stabilise the Dutch grid. For that, many cars are needed.
We Drive Solar started in 2016 as a car-sharing business. Eventually it developed the company calls the controllable neighbourhood battery approach, where discharging back into the grid was for a closely knit group of EV users. The first public installations came online this spring.
Berg sees bidirectional charging as a scalable, sustainable solution, but warns that political uncertainty and policy fluctuations (such as the reduction of wind yield ambitions and possible changes in subsidy and net metering schemes) inhibit implementation. Moreover, if the current net metering scheme expires in 2027, there is a threat of a double energy tax on the use of cars as batteries; Berg says he is in talks with the Ministry of Finance about this.
NRC Handelsblad reported that the bidirectional chargers in Lombok remain an experiment to show that EVs can act as distributed storage. To scale this up will require more advanced technology and also more partners if the Dutch grid is to be future-proof and sustainable, noted the newspaper.
