Nissan and UK energy technology company OVO have announced a new collaboration to accelerate a vehicle-to-grid (V2G) service in the UK in 2018.
The V2G service will be available for customers buying the new Nissan Leaf from January 2018 onwards, and will allow households to connect to the grid to charge at low-demand and cheap tariff periods.
Customers will also be able to use the electricity stored in the vehicle’s battery at home or feed it back into the grid.
Ovo said it also plans to create special tariffs to reward customers who use the service to interact with the grid.
Stephen Fitzpatrick, OVO CEO, said: “Electric vehicles are fast becoming a mainstream option for drivers and solve many of the challenges facing our cities.
“We believe that they have an integral part to play in the twenty-first century power grid and accelerating decarbonisation and mobility.
“We’re delighted that we can now offer such a compelling incentive to customers who are generating their own clean power, providing a truly sustainable alternative to the traditional energy model.”
V2G technology allows electric vehicles to be fully integrated into the electricity grid and will likely help the grid maximise the use of renewables in the energy system.
Currently if all 20,000 Nissan electric vehicles in the UK were connected to the energy network, OVO estimates that they would generate the equivalent output of a 200 MW power plant with a 10kW charger.
In a future where all vehicles on UK roads are electric, V2G technology could generate a virtual power plant of up to 200 GW.
This energy capacity is more than double the peak requirement on the UK grid.
