In a society where climate change is one of the most prominent challenges to be addressed, the adoption of renewable energies inevitably stands out. With the growing development of solar and wind power come technical difficulties with the intermittent and unpredictable nature of these electricity sources. By intermittent, it is understood that these sources are not available at any time during the day or the night. Instead, electricity is produced only when the sun shines and the wind blows. In a grid where the renewable energy capacity is important, it can happen that the supply of green electricity is higher than the demand for it. In that case, there are two solutions available: waste it or store it. As you can imagine, the second option is preferable. However, storing it is not as easy as it may seem. As of today, few reliable storage methods are suitable due to their high price and inability to scale. This article discusses a new method called Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) that could revolutionize the way we think of electricity storage.

V2G can be simply described as “using the battery within an electric vehicle to provide storage for the electricity grid”. It means that instead of building new resource intensive batteries for electricity storage, we can make use of the ones already available in any electric vehicle (EV). In case of high renewable electricity production, the excess is stored in the EVs while in case of low renewable electricity production, (during the night for instance with photovoltaic/solar) the electricity is reinjected in the grid to power your home. To this end, powerful algorithms are required to allocate the electricity from to grid to your car or vice versa. The following graphic depicts the basic functioning of V2G.

Considering the always increasing amount of EVs available and the similarly improved penetration of solar and wind facilities, this system could provide an efficient and cost-effective way to address electricity storage which could boost further development in the green electricity space. To that end, we, at SAVVY, aim to invest in funds that help contribute to the development of this technology in order to ensure that the energy transition goes as smoothly as possible.

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