Your electric vehicle, if you have one, may soon be able to sell its stored power to the National Electricity Market.
It’s already working in other more enlightened countries but the ACT Government, bless them, is trialing a smart charging system on their government EV fleet to allow the grid to draw power from their batteries. This is a contingency arrangement for the occasional times when the grid cannot meet demand.
EV owners get paid by the NEM for hooking up to the grid and the grid is stabilised at times when storms and outages occur. What’s not to like?
Bjorn Sturmberg at the ANU writes about this in EcoGeneration.
He says EV owners should earn more than $1,000/year from this deal – three times as much as the average cost of driving the average annual motoring distance on electricity.
He imagines a future in which Australia’s 19 million vehicles are electrified, drawing 60 terrawatt hours of electricity a year – that’s around 35% of our current annual power consumption. However, the battery storage capacity of 19 million vehicles would be ~1,800 gigawatt hours – equivalent to five new Snowy 2.0 hydro electric projects.
These batteries mean EV owners can charge up using free home solar power when the sun is shining instead of the miserly rate they currently receive for feeding it back onto the grid.
Sadly, the Prime Minister’s Electric Vehicle Strategy, promised in June, is still nowhere to be seen ….