Hello Shiela, firstly i wish to thank you for very interesting, informative and enjoyable videos. The clear manner you speak and explain the issues makes watching your videos so enjoyable. I have solar panels and live in Spain, so generally manage to produce enough electricity to half my electricity bills. I only have a small house and my panels are on the roof. I would very much like to own an electric car but i find they are too expensive at the moment. I will keep watching your interesting series of films. Thank you. Steve
Hello Steve, We have been amazed by the difference having the car plugged in makes. Two days ago, the charger developed a fault around lunchtime but we did not notice until early evening when we rebooted it. The difference that day in our electricity bill was over £3.00! Keep looking out for a second-hand EV, the prices are very affordable now. Thank you for watching and for your kind comments. Sheila.
Hey Shelia , I have enjoyed watching your Journey to a greener future with your vehicle to grid technology and I’m so impressed that you were an early adopter both of the vehicle and the technology including solar .here in Australia we have just begun a similar trial in our capital ACT also using 50 62kw Nissan leafs as a test bed so hopefully it can become the norm here in Australia as we definitely have a surge use every evening when people need to use more power than is available and we are still running coal fired and natural gas generators. We have the Highest number of solar panel arrays on private homes in the world second only to Sweden so this would be perfect for our climate. Again thanks for your informative videos
We have always thought your climate would be perfect for solar with V2G. The UK managed several months without any coal-fired generation last summer; this trend is now also starting to apply to gas. As far as we personally are concerned, due to V2G, our home is now carbon neutral which is great news. Thank you for watching and taking the time to comment. Sheila.
Hi Jim, Thank you for your comments on all three videos; I am glad you enjoyed them and found them enlightening. I agree with you that V2G is vital to support the grid going forward. Thank you also for subscribing, we will be making another video shortly. Cheers, Sheila
Here in the States, this idea is finally being implemented by the Ford Corp. I can't wait to have this done to my place as well. Bravo on renewables. OUTSTANDING! 🥳
I'd be interested to know how Ford will do this using a CCS connector. (Or maybe there is a separate V2G connector?) So pleased it is happening anyway. FYI, here is a link to a short unlisted video showing our carbon footprint now we are helping the grid with V2G. ruclips.net/video/zDNCjTzgbiI/видео.html
There will be a fourth shortly. Our two-year trial has now ended but for the time being, we will stay with the same arrangement. We will however sum up all our figures for the entire 2 years. Then we'll see what happens next! Thank you for watching.
Hello, Very informative video. Hanging out for the next episode. Interested to know the condition of your battery too as we don't have the technology in New Zealand yet and there are many doubters.
Hi, Tony, We really must start on the next episode soon! We have waited because we have reached the end of our trial 2 years and we would like to be able to pass on what we do next. Indra has a Vehicle 2 Home (V2H) load-balancing project in the pipeline that we have offered to look at but right now, we're not sure that would work out to be more advantageous for us monetarily. We need to know a lot more before we jump ship away from OVO V2G. Perhaps we need to make a brief overview of the last 2 years, answer a few questions then add a "what comes next" video later when our decision is made. Thank you for your interest and your comment.
Thank you so much for your comment, Laurence, that's a real compliment! :-) We have been planning a fourth edition of course. We've been torn between doing one now when we have our first complete year of good quality data without any missing bits or waiting until November when our 2-year trial officially ends. We also want to include the answers to many of the common questions we are asked in these comments. Perhaps the moment is nearing; your request has certainly reminded us we have subscribers eager to hear more! Thank you for watching. Sheila.
Hi I’ve just watched your 3 videos, very interesting, thank you. I see that your 2 year anniversary would have been about August 2021? Do you plan any further updates on your V2G experience?
Hi, Stephen, We are planning to shoot an update in the not-too-distant future. We have volunteered to join a trial for Indra's Vehicle 2 Home Load Balancing system but nothing's happened about that - yet. Right now, however, OVO is keeping us on the same tariff we have been on since the start of the trial so we're not about to change anything until we have a clear view of how that will impact us financially. We'd like the next video to include what we're going to do next but we seem to be in a bit of a limbo. It will be interesting to see what OVO offer when the next price cap is removed later in the year. If the cost of electricity is going to rise dramatically, we would naturally expect to be paid more when exporting to the grid. We shall see! Right now, we can pass on that after two and a half years of V2G and three years of driving 20,000 miles, our battery has a State of Health (SOH) of 94.6% and we are still seeing an estimated range of 230+ miles when fully charged which is pretty much what we started out with; we see this as being very positive. Thank you for watching and commenting. Cheers, Sheila.
Great video, thanks for all the information. I'm about to purchase a 40kwh model and am considering V2G. I'd be interested to see an update. Or even if you could post your current leafspy data so we can see how your battery health has changed compared to cars that don't use v2g.
Our car is now over two and half years old and is still continuously connected to V2G when at home - which is most of the time - we've retired, so there is no daily commute for us! We're working on a latest-figures-only update at the moment but the headline is that despite V2G using the battery probably four or fives times as much as we have in driving, our current state of health is around 94.6% Typically, right now, we are seeing an estimated range of 225 - 230 miles. Thanks for watching and commenting, Matt.
Hi, I have registered my interest with Indra for their upcoming V2H trials. Like many people, I am a little apprehensive about the effects of this type of system on battery health of a Leaf but was very interested to see your SOH figures had been largely unaffected after 12 months. As you have now been using a V2X system for three years it would be very useful for an update, particularly your thoughts and stats on battery health. Thank you 👍
Fantastic video series. Thanks so much. I’m interested in the tariffs. I noticed your reply to another comment was a flat rate import price of 14p, and an export price of 32p. That seems very advantageous. Did your energy supplier agree this as it is a trial? Before you had V2G and only had solar, I would have expected your export tariff around 5p. Why the sudden increase? Lastly, I suppose it would be interesting to know if you had to put up all the capital for the installation, and what your payback period is roughly looking like? If because it was a trial there was a cost share, it’d be interesting to know roughly what it would be if the homeowner had to finance the whole thing. Cheers Nick (in the U.K.)
Hi, Nick, The tariffs are a flat rate and were set by OVO at the beginning of the trial, except originally it was 14p to import and 26p to export. When electricity prices went through the roof recently, OVO spontaneously and voluntarily raised our export rate to 32p per kWh which we thought was very generous of them. As far as we know, every household on the OVO trial that has both V2G and solar panels is on the same rate as us. We'll see what happens in September when our current agreement comes to an end. At that point, we may opt out of V2G or move more towards V2H with Indra's new load-balancing scheme. We'll see! We did not pay for this installation. If we had had to, being pensioners, we probably could not have afforded it. The trial we are on is part of a government-funded V2G trial of 330 UK households right across the country. We can only estimate or guess what the costs would have been and our best guess would probably be somewhere around the £5k - £6k mark. Having said that, OVO actually paid us £989.72 last calendar year so, at our current flat rates, payback in a reasonable timeframe would not be impossible. Thank you for watching and commenting. Sheila.
Fantastic videos. I've seen a few naysayers discussing V2G as a theoretical pipe dream, and your channel ha's been a great resource to point them to as real world examples of it successfully in action. Sounds like there's a few kinks to iron out, but overall seems like a positive outcome? Did you have to pay for the installation if V2G?
Hi, Lord B, No, we did not have to pay for the installation. If you watched our first video you can see it would probably have cost a few thousand pounds. This is, we believe, the world's largest V2G trial. It is subsidised by the UK government and currently has over 300 vehicles connected. We believe the next largest scheme is in Australia which is with just 30 Nissan Leafs. Thank you for watching and we're glad you are showing our video to others - please keep doing so! :-)
Again, great informative video. We have had our V2G system nearly 6 months and was installed just before lockdown. We don't have solar but do have 2 EVs, a 2013 Leaf 24 and a 2020 Leaf 40. So we charge both cars using the system and swap from time to time to take turns in exporting. OVOs billing as you say is very confusing and does not give a figure for exported energy on the bill but Kaluza app does. I was concerned that I may end up spending more on charging compared to our previous E7 tariff but currently over £200 in credit and my monthly payments stayed the same, so go figure...it's working for me 👍 Thanks for the video, and look forward to the next installment.
I appreciate the video! Btw, regarding your question about why the mileage doesn’t match, it’s because one of them is mislabeled - the 8781 figure should be kilometers, not miles (8781 km = 5456 miles). Hope that helps solve at least one of the mysteries, haha. =)
Hi, Michael, Embarrassingly, my brother worked out the miles/kilometres thing within an hour of the video going live! :-) We did mention this in the video description. In fact, the car odometer is, of course, correct - we did drive over 8,000 miles - but the software thinks the figure is in kilometres and tries to be helpful and converts it, erroneously, to the figure shown. Thank you for watching and commenting. Sheila.
Enjoyed the video simple and very informative. Hope one day the technology and service arrives to Texas,USA. You should contact Robert at fully charged and let him V2grid is happening in UK.
Robert Llewellyn spoke at the very first ElectrAA event in Malvern in 2014 and it was on his advice that we bought our first Nissan Leaf that year as our first EV purchase. Robert has done a few videos on Vehicle to Grid. Here are a couple of links for you: ruclips.net/video/QCYcsk40FLs/видео.html -- ruclips.net/video/qLE2SrDNPZc/видео.html In the second video you will see on the right Mike Schooling of Indra who is seen in our video when we took our 62kWh Leaf to test it out with V2G for the first time.
Hi Sheila, Great video series, I'm looking forward to the newest update :) Is the power drawn from the car while the V2G operation dynamic or at a static level, like continuous for 5kW?
Hi, Roman, The day-to-day charging and discharging of the vehicle is done at the command of our electricity supplier - OVO. As we understand it, wholesale electricity is sold in half-hour increments. Each supplier tries to estimate what their demand will be in any/every half-hour time slot. if they under, or overestimate, they are charged more. So, if they have underestimated the demand, they will instruct all the vehicles attached to V2G to start charging - to use more and meet their estimate. Similarly, if they overestimated they will instruct the cares to send electricity to the grid - so they draw less from the national grid and again, try to meet their estimate. Have a close look at the graphs at around 3 minutes into the video, charging and discharging can happen at odd intervals and times according to the needs of the grid and our electricity supplier. Added to this, in general, they will charge the car while electricity is cheap and green in the small hours and sell it back during peak times. This is to try to "flatten" the load on the grid across the 24-hour day-night cycle. It's also how we make the majority of our money from the scheme! While doing this, the software still obeys our requirements of course - that come what may, we will always have 35% left in the battery and we don't wish the car to charge beyond 75% unless we "boost" it to 100% in anticipation of a long journey. Thank you for watching, Sheila.
"2020 has been a odd year..." This comment should win "Most understated statement of the year award" This seems liek a pretty neat system btw, I stumbled across your channel by accident. You remind me of my mum, cept you're nicer. lol Keep it up and i'll come back for the updates. Subbed
I'm sure your Mum is lovely Michael, but thank you for the compliment. And thank you for subscribing also; we don't make videos very often but when we do we try to pack in a lot of information. The next one will be at the end of the year and our first full year with V2G.
Thank you for this video, it really is very informative, and what a great project. I'd love to see this technology take a major role in the ecological energy transition. You asked viewers if they had any ideas about the odometer observation. I think it might just be an error in the "untis" on the car's display. Doing a quick conversion calculation it seems to me that the car is very possibly displaying kilometres but giving it a "miles" label. I do hope your V2G proves to be a durable energy option, and thank you again for sharing this story.
@@TC-ch1ms Thank you for your kind comments. Yes, the miles/kilometres thing was spotted by my brother within a couple of hours which was a bit embarrassing! :-) The car's mileage is the correct actual figure for distance travelled during the year. Thank you for watching.
@@ElectrAA jetcharge.com.au/services/vehicle-to-grid we are planning to use Solar Panels + 40kWh in the Nissan Leaf + the #Wallbox #Quasar. hopefully would deliver the same result as yours
Hi, V2G is still just great, thank you. I think total normality is still a bit out of reach, but we're heading in the right direction. We will be trying to find some time to shoot a roundup of our first two complete years with V2G shortly. Thank you for watching and commenting.
Here in Australia, we only have one Nissan Leaf available. Any thoughts on the usefulness of V2G with a smaller capacity car battery? Really appreciate your videos, BTW 😊
Hi, Roslyn, It is technically possible to participate in V2G with an original 2010 24kWh Leaf. In fact, Mike Schooling, CEO of Indra, the company that designed the charger/inverter we use, has taken a 24kWh leaf to his home and used it with his own V2G system. However, you probably would not want to do this, because to give the grid enough battery capacity to make V2G worthwhile, it would not leave sufficient in the car battery for emergencies. Thus, one of the rules of the OVO/Kaluza/Indra/Nissan trial we are involved in is that you must have a 30kWh Leaf to participate in the trial. Our new Leaf is 62kWh, so that's fine as we can happily let our battery drain to 35% and still be certain of 80 miles range in case of emergencies. If we ever had to do a longer journey than that in a hurry, 80 miles range gives us a choice of rapid chargers we could use en route. So, the answer is you really need a 30kWh battery or larger to be sensible. I wonder what you mean by "We only have one Nissan leaf available". Do you not have the new(ish) E+ 3.Zero / N-Connecta Leaf over there?
@@ElectrAA - another AUstralian here. The current situation is that Nissan Australia brings in both the 40 and 62kWH models. However like NZ there is also a large market in used Japanese Leafs, which include the earlier verisons. There's also a (very) few Australian delivered early ones hanging around.
Christian from EV2Power.co.uk commented by email . . . Hi Sheila - I love all your videos and have been following your progress. I hope you don't mind but I have added a link to these videos to a couple of websites I look after - the first is The Wiltshire Climate Alliance and the second is EV2Power.co.uk do let me know if you would rather I take them off but I hope that you will agree that people need to hear the message that EVs have so much potential to reduce carbon emissions. Thanks again for putting together the videos which are so well put together. Christian.
Hi, Christian, Of course, you can include links to our videos in your sites. The more people learn about this sort of technology the more they will press for it to become mainstream. Good luck with EV2Power, it looks like an interesting addition to a fossil fuel-free future. Sheila.
Hi, Jonathon, This one: www.indra.co.uk/vehicle-to-grid-charger The charger is not the whole picture though. You need to be on a V2G scheme with your electricity supplier to take advantage of Vehicle to Grid. See our first video to find out how many companies were involved in setting us up. Thank you for watching.
@@ElectrAA You're the only channel I've seen that really covers the Vehicle to Grid in a practical sense so I'd be interested in watching any content on it, pros/cons of having it, integration with solar panels and ev. It would be time consuming but it would be cool to see the differences with the various battery level settings, like the 35%-70% setting.
@@ElSegador99 We'll bear that in mind! Maybe we should do some experiments but as the car seems to be behaving itself very well, we're reluctant to change things too much!
Hi, Kees, The charger is silent. There is no noise other than in very hot weather there is an internal fan that might switch on occasionally to cool the electronics. However, we have never heard it ourselves and we only know of its existence because it comes on for a second or two as part of the self-test if the unit is restarted or rebooted. Externally, we can discern no heat regardless of whether the unit is charging the car or sending electricity to the grid. Thank you for watching and commenting.
Can you share your total kwh brought from the grid each month and Solar production per month and sold to the grid each month. Also how many kW is your solar install.
Our solar panels are a standard 16-panel 4kW array. The only oddity is that our roofs face East-West so we have 10 panels at the rear of the house (East) and six in the front (West). Your other question is a bit harder to answer because OVO makes no distinction between the power sent to the grid by the car and that sent by the solar panels. Kaluza supplies a great deal of data, but frankly, much of it makes little sense. You are welcome to see these two spreadsheets showing Kaluza's data for August 2020 and January 2021. See if you can make any sense of "zero export to the grid" as quite clearly, we are being paid for many kWh sent to the grid by the car each month. The one aspect of all this that does not work well is the accounting! drive.google.com/file/d/12Ir-66dEy6WX1FcOZ6eHtsdnwGohc8Q1/view?usp=sharing drive.google.com/file/d/13UpXIy5px-80y2ces-BNa3o3C-xmkZFs/view?usp=sharing Thank you for watching.
Hello! Give you respect from Korea! :) I'm intested in V2G recently and your video is so helpful. Thank you so much and please keep uploading video about v2g haha 😄. Take care and good luck!
Really informative thank you. Do you use the power exclusively for export to the grid or do you also use the battery power to power your home as well? Thank you
After dark, when our solar panels are not generating and the car is sending electricity to the grid, what reaches the grid is what is left after our house has taken what it needs. Have another look at this short section of our second video which explains how the system works. ruclips.net/video/pq_aQwWAK4o/видео.html Also, we have a short video that demonstrates this in action. You are welcome to view it at ruclips.net/video/gbk7sAsD_GE/видео.html Thank you for watching and commenting. Cheers, Sheila.
Of course you may! The prime reason we wanted to be on the V2G trial was to help blaze a trail for this sort of technology. We warmly welcome as much sharing of information about V2G, V2H, V2L and allied technologies as possible. Please feel free - anyone - to use and share our videos. Thank you for watching and commenting. Sheila.
Thank you for the video I think your channel is the only one talking about this system. I liked you transparency. The V to G system that you are using is it specific to your new Leaf? I own a 2017 Chevy Bolt and I’m interested in having a similar setup with my current vehicle or a future vehicle.
Thank you for your kind comments. Our V2G system is specific to the Leaf in that V2G only works with the CHAdeMO connector and where the vehicle has been engineered for both charge and discharge through the connector. Even the original 2010 Leaf was so designed. Certainly, in the trial we are in, one of the stipulations is that currently, a Leaf with a battery capacity of 30kWh or more are the only vehicles they will accept. The Bolt EV uses the SAE Combined Charging Standard (CCS) Combo connector for DC fast charging. Neither Type 2 nor CCS is bi-directional and Indra tell us there won't be a bi-directional revision of the CCS standard until around 2025 - 2026. So, you can't do Vehicle to Grid yet I'm afraid, but remember to ask the question when you change cars next time! It will come - because it has to! :-)
Great video. I'll start this autumn with V2H with the Nissan Leaf 62 kWh. Can you give us an update of your experience? Thanks for sharing your work ;) Nice greetings from Bavaria.
Hi, Klaus, We will be making our next video in November at the end of our two year V2G trial. We hope at this time to also be able to say what's next - we would like to join in with another trial that is essentially V2H but including load balancing, the idea being to import as little as possible from the grid at all times. Watch this space! :-) Thank you for watching.
@@ElectrAA That would be great. V2H with this configuration is my future goal - in combination with photovoltaics. I am looking forward to it. You're welcome.
We bought the car in November 2019 and drove it normally until March when PM restricted all non-essential driving. These restrictions were lifted piecemeal later that year but by July we were driving fairly normally again. See: www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/chart-images/timeline-coronavirus-lockdown-december-2021_0.png
Hi, Geert, Thank you for watching and your kind comment. I'm sure V2G will reach all countries eventually. Write to your government's Minister for Transport and suggest it!
Utrecht in the Netherlands has a project which uses a huge solar roof above a car park that currently has around 250 cars, which t they hope to increase to 450 very soon that those vehicles will all be fully charged by the solar panels PLUS he able to supply the grid network to have an income to offset the cost of the solar roof.
Each individual user gets two years with the V2G trial, so ours will expire in November this year - two years after our installation. We will certainly keep using the system as long as we can. OVO and Kaluza have promised to keep the software running until at least 2023. Thank you for watching.
Both functions are contained in the single unit you see on the wall. The word 'charger' is actually incorrect. The 7kW charger is actually in the car, the charging part of the unit in the wall is actually just an intelligent power supply to the car (an EVSE - Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment). The wall unit does however have an inverter within it. This is the equipment that takes the DC voltage from the battery and converts it into (up to) 6kW of 240volt 50Hz alternating current in synchronisation with the grid. That's the long (correct) answer, the simple one is no, the one unit on the wall does both. :-) Thank you for watching and for your question.
HI, Adel, no there isn't, but we don't see the number of charges as being a problem. When we dropped our "Ready By" requirement, the car charged and discharged to support the grid. Many of those charges (and discharges) were for just a few dozen Watthours. I suppose if we put the "Ready By" setting back this wouild limit the number of charges, (as per the first set of graphs we showed in the video). However, if you think about it, every time you brake or go downhill in the Leaf the car switches into charging mode! This could happen dozens of times per hour while driving. I don't think the number of charges is a problem. Thank you for watching and your question.
No, we don't. We did investigate batteries, even before we had our first Leaf in 2014, but it was difficult to make a financial case for it. The car IS our battery and we have no plans to alter that in the near future. Thank you for watching! :-)
Firstly WOW. Sheila you are a captivating person , your voice is beautiful. If you are not doing voice overs as a business you should start now!!!! On to the main question. Do you have a COST for changing to a three phase installation or was this payed for by ovo energy ? I am looking at V2G in the near future. Are nissan the only manufacturer to adopt this on their vehicle?
Hi, Dave, Thank you for watching and for your kind comments. Firstly, we're not on 3 phase, the groundworks by Western Power and Keir was just to give us our own individual single-phase electricity supply, separated from our neighbour. We now have our own 100Amp cable from the street (fused at 80 Amps) directly to our meter box. Secondly, we didn't pay for all that work. If we had had to, I doubt we could have afforded it. The money came from a government-funded scheme to trial V2G with 300 OVO energy users. The scheme runs for two years for each individual subscriber, but OVO plans to keep it going until 2023 at least. The answer to your final question is a bit longer. Nissan is a leader in the CHAdeMO Consortium - the body that developed the CHAdeMO standard back in the early 2000s. Any vehicle with a CHAdeMO connector is technically capable of working with V2G. At the moment, only CHAdeMO is 'two-way' allowing current from the battery to be sent out of the car connector. In our case, this goes to the OVO/Indra unit (which includes a 6kW inverter) which inserts 50Hz synchronised mains electricity into the grid. CHAdeMO is, however, not the preferred European connector and CCS is becoming the European standard. CCS is charge-only and cannot, therefore, do V2G at this time. We expect to see a revision to the CCS technology and protocol to appear in 2025/2026 that will be bi-directional. There is, in fact, a combined CHAdeMO/CCS connector called Chaoji! We're just waiting and watching at the moment to see what develops. For the next five-six years at least, a vehicle with CHAdeMO is your only option if you wish to do V2G. Right now, there is really only one sensible vehicle to buy if you wish to do V2G and that is the Nissan Leaf. Any past or present model with a 30kWh battery or larger should be acceptable. (The early 24kWh vehicles are V2G-capable, but their use with V2G would be limited and certainly leave too-small a mileage in the battery for emergencies.) However . . . even given the right car, there are not many opportunities to join a V2G scheme at this time. The OVO scheme has now closed to new accounts, Octopus Energy is running a trial but only in Kent and the Southeast and that will cease taking on new people in March 2021. Basically, talk to your preferred electricity provider to see what they are doing or planning and keep your ear to the ground! Good luck and thank you for your question.
@@ElectrAA Thank you for this information , even though i follow every thing to do with solar EVs and V2G i didnt know about these trials , you should be on fully charged show
@@rodden1953 Robert Llewellyn has spoken at a couple of ElectrAA events. He has done quite a few videos on V2G, if you search within his channel you will find them. Thank you for watching.
thanks for video, interesting and good to hear and see. Could be wrong, SOH is the loss of battery capacity. 100% SOH = 62kWh. 0% SOH = 80% of original capacity. 0% SOH = 49.6kWh (80% of 49.6). The battery health could be the internal battery impedance. started out at 100% which is say 10mohms. Over time if it gets to double then they consider end of life. 200% = 20mohms. 112.68% would now be 11.268mohms.
Aha!. We hadn't thought of that. You may well be right and it's certainly the best explanation so far. Thank you for taking the time to watch and comment. Sheila.
Hi, Excellent video, it's really insightful to see the details and realities of V2G in action. I have a question regarding tariffs, as you are discharging to the grid at peak times and charging during the hours with lower demand, does OVO offer you a variable tariff based on the half hourly market price of the electricity you use/export? Thanks
Hi, Jamie, the simple answer is no. Part of the agreement to being on the OVO trial is that we are on a flat rate both for import and export. We pay approximately 14p per kWh for all our electricity and receive 26p per kWh when sending power to the grid - regardless of time or season. We are on the 26p rate because we have solar panels and anything sent to the grid from those is also paid at 26p per kWh - far better than the government rate. If we did not have the solar panels, the OVO export rate would be 30p per kWh - but we're not complaining! Thank you for watching and your question.
@@ElectrAA Thanks for the reply, this is very interesting. Are these flat rate prices then conditional to you using the Kaluza app to decide the times at which the car discharges?
@@jkefunk The whole deal is a package, you get the free charger, the Kaluza App and the OVO flat rate account. Remember, this is all very experimental at the moment, so I guess they're keeping it simple. The prospect of accounting for multiple rates for both import and export to the grid on a half-hour time block basis for hundreds of users, each with different needs and different app settings must be pretty horrifying. It will come of course, but this project is primarily to establish the viability of it. We could be stricter with the app settings but as we explained, at the moment, we're not joy-riding in the car a lot :-( so we might as well let the app manage things to the best benefit of the grid.
Could I use this in a similar fashion as a solar battery ? I don't want to pump any of the energy into the grid but I want it to supply power to my house when the sun isn't out, like at night.
Yes, that is what Vehicle to Home - V2H - is all about. All that really changes between V2G and V2H is the software, the hardware can be exactly the same. Have a look at this Nissan Video for an idea of how that works in Japan where they do it a lot. ruclips.net/video/x78XGElU2I0/видео.html The difference between using the car and a static battery is of course that when the car is away from home it can neither charge nor supply power to the house, so you have to take into account your personal car usage habits. See also our most recent video where we show and talk about this. ruclips.net/video/JcGdy66f3Kc/видео.html Thank you for watching. Sheila.
Hi, Ben, thank you for watching and commenting. Thankfully, we did not have to pay for the installation. If you watched our first video you can see it would probably have cost a few thousand pounds! This is part of the world's largest V2G trial. It is subsidised by the UK government and currently has around 330 vehicles connected.
Hi, Davide, This one: www.indra.co.uk/v2g It was supplied to us as part of the OVO, Indra, Kaluza trial of 330 UK households. Thank you for watching and commenting.
Hiya. I'm one of the forum volunteers over at the OVO Forum. It's great to see you're getting on really well with V2G. Would you be OK with me letting the Community Manager know about this? I think he'd be very interested.
Hi, If you're talking about Tim, I think you'll find he already knows us pretty well - Sheila as herself of course and me as Stephen Bell. V2G forum questions sometimes get referred to us for an opinion or comment. Ovo also put us in touch with the Sunday Times recently, so we should be appearing in that shortly. Thank you for watching and taking the time to comment.
State of Charge is the potential capacity of the battery cells, State of Health is the real world usable capacity compared to new.. so probably the only one worth bothering about as a driver.
HI, Paul, this was always a test - a trial scheme. I did ask the question of OVO and I'm sure they won't mind me repeating their answer here. They said: "We’ve confirmed that the 2 year trial period for the V2G charger started when your V2G unit was installed. Once you get to the end of your two years, you will be given the chance to buy the charger for £0.01, or we can remove it for you. The charger will continue to work in the same way after your two years if you take ownership of it: we plan to continue supporting the app until at least January 2023. We hope that the majority of members will stay with OVO and our V2G propositions beyond the end of their 2-year trial so that we can continue providing support to the grid together. There have also been some questions about V2G as a concept and how OVO plans to develop this in the future. There are some open questions about future V2G technology, particularly around support for CCS V2G. We’re following this as it evolves to inform our future V2G offering."
Hi, Aung, You probably mean LeafSpy Pro - which is exactly what we did use. [ play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Turbo3.Leaf_Spy_Pro&hl=en-GB ] As far as we know, there is no other, better or more accurate option. The graphs we show come directly from the app. Thank you for watching.
First of all, thanks for sharing this experience with us !! The explanation was very educational, I appreciate the plain and simple arguing. But at the end of the video there are some lose ends that make me feel this system is not yet working in its perfection. I agree with your concern on contradictory data reports, precisely on key figures that make a difference to assess the good performance of the system !! The miles discrepancy could very well be a mathematics conversion error to km. But the increasing battery life value over time and usage ? Anything above 100% must be an error in the software calculation. Also I still have my doubts on the wear&tear of your car battery after a number of charge-discharge cycles: it is obviously not counting well, again probably the software is underestimating the reality. My main concern on a V2G system is the slowly reduced loading capacity, eventually ending up the battery life (would it swell?). I would appreciate if in your next video by Xmas you may address these important issues for our information. Thanks very much for the time you dedicate to this experience !!!
Thank you for your comments and questions. The single most important statistic reported by the car and Leaf Spy is State of Health - SOH. That is the only one worth our attention. SOH does what it says on the tin - shows how healthy the battery is. That other "battery health" figure amused us, but we pay it no credence and so far nobody has been able to tell us what it means! You commented, "My main concern on a V2G system is the slowly reduced loading capacity..." Bear in mind, V2G does not invalidate Nissan's battery warranty. That fact alone is a huge comfort in letting our car and its battery be used in this way. We genuinely believe we have lost 1.6% or just over 3 miles of our range. Given the lack of vehicle use during this strange year we genuinely believe V2G has helped maintain the battery. Have a look at these links - and try not to be so pessimistic! :-) is.gd/V2GLink1 is.gd/V2GLink2 is.gd/V2GLink3 Our next video may well wait until March. If you watch the 3 months video, you will have seen that nothing settled down until March this year so to get a true idea of a complete year, we think we should wait a while. The discrepancy in the odometer is explained in the video description. Thank you for watching. S & S
Hi, Tal, Nissan is a car manufacturer. Its part in V2G ceased when they designed the original Nissan leaf with a CHAdeMO connector that could work both from, and to, the electric grid. Nissan has no interest in the National Grid, software or the electronic hardware required for V2G. V2G needs a combination of the right vehicle with the right battery and the right connector (Nissan's part) plus the electronic hardware that is both a rectifier and an inverter (that's Indra's contribution) plus the software to communicate between the grid, the charger and the car and manage the whole process (written by Kaluza) and the electricity supply company to command the system to its best advantage, manage the data and the accounting (OVO). In our case, we also had the assistance of Kier who did all the Groundworks and Western Power who had to re-cable our house and make a new connection to the electricity mains in the street (see part 1 of this series for more about that). A car manufacturer is not in a position to do all that! Thank you for watching.
Can we configure the V2G to use the car's battery on a specific timeframe? And also configure the V2G to charge the car only between a certain time frame?
Hi, Helder, The simple answer is no. Not because it's not possible - just about anything is possible with technology, but because the whole point of V2G is that the grid uses the charge in the car when it needs to and charges the car when it needs to use more electricity. On different days this will occur at different times and for different numbers of Kilowatt Hours. To understand why an energy supplier such as OVO might wish to tell our system to charge or discharge, back and forth, at many different times a day, you need to understand the bidding process for electricity. That's way beyond the scope of this answer but you could try Googling for 'Bidding for electricity in the UK'. I guess you are asking the question because you wish to take advantage of low-cost electricity and charge the car at those times. This is what V2G does anyway. We pay 14pence per kWh imported and we are paid 26 pence per kWh exported - and that includes the electricity from our solar panels. Admittedly, this is a flat rate scheme, but frankly, the complexities of running V2G together with continually changing rates of charge and payment would be mind-boggling. Again, of course, it's possible because anything is, but let's get this trial under our belts first! Thank you for watching and your question.
@@ElectrAA correct, we have no solar panels but we have cheap electricity from the grid between 10pm and 8am. Our highest consumption is during the day, (outside of that cheap period) and is about 12kW. So last night I found myself thinking what if I could use an electric car to store the power during the night and run the whole house on the car's battery during the day?! First results on google, your video popped up :) thanks. I didnt know this was possible/accessible to consumers. I will be really looking into this now. We could cut our electricity bill in half with that V2G unit or a similar one, specially if would allow us to control times for G2V and schedule when the unit does V2House. Thanks again and happy new year.
@@HelderNevesHelderNeves You're actually talking about Vehicle to Home - V2H - which is subtly different. V2G is primarily about supporting the grid, being environmentally friendly and giving consumers lower pricing for their electricity and/or allowing them essentially to have free travel. V2H is to do exactly what you are suggesting. Have a look at this video: ruclips.net/video/x78XGElU2I0/видео.html V2G is not quite what you're after. Ask your preferred electricity supplier what they can offer. Good luck - make a video about it! Sheila.
Hi, Chris, We were getting a good price for export but the recent energy shortages and massive price rises have put paid to a lot of that. Please watch the latest episode for our most recent update. Thank you for watching. Sheila.
I'm not sure I can answer this simply. A sample of our figures can be seen in the video. It's difficult to single out "cheaper electricity" because what we pay is the result of what we spend plus what our solar panels generate plus what the Grid (via OVO) pays us for the solar energy and V2G export. During the last 12 months, our income from V2G was £989.93 but we obviously paid for a lot of electricity and of course, we used what our solar panels generated. Overall, during the summer months, we make a profit and that includes all our energy including the gas we use. Our rates from OVO are (as mentioned) a flat rate. Right now (November 2021) because energy is very expensive, we are paying 14p per kWh when we import from the grid but we are paid 31p per kWh when we export. Maybe that answers your question? Thank you for watching. Sheila.
Could you run this alongside economy 7. So you buy overnight at 5p per kWh and sell back at peak times! I guess you would need a second grid connection and you would pay a second standing charge for that.
I'm not sure how that could work - how would the two companies split the charges? - they would need to cooperate and that's not going to happen when OVO have invested so much into this trial. Remember, we had all this installed for free and one of the stipulations on which this works is that we have to be on the OVO Flat Rate Tariff. To be frank with you, this is as much about the future of electricity generation and management, ecology and the environment as it is about us making money; we're making a profit during the summer months already - let's not be too greedy! :-)
@@ElectrAA yes quite, I think some people charge their car and fill powerwall on economy 7 and use powerwall and solar to avoid the peak time charges. But as for selling back with V2G as well 😀
Hi, Samurai, CCS does not support V2G or V2H. At the moment CCS is one-way only. This is expected to change around 2025-2026 when the CCS protocols and technology are expected to be upgraded to do this. However, this does not mean any car manufactured previously with CCS will then be able to support V2G. Only vehicles made with the new CCS technology onboard will be able to do this. (This does show how far ahead Nissan and the CHAdeMO Consortium were when the first Leaf was sold back in 2010.) It will come but I'm afraid your lovely new Mustang won't be able to join in. Thank you for watching and commenting. Sheila.
@@SamuraiTacos1 No, it's what we would call a Type 1 connector as used on the original Nissan Leaf primarily for home charging. There's an article describing it here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAE_J1772 . Interestingly, Type 1 became the basis of the CCS system.
I heard that "Bat Health", is versus a graph of expected lifespan. It's says at 2 years your battery should be some voltage at rest. So being in the plus means your resting voltage is higher than expected.
This has to be the way to go. We all know that renewables cannot supply a steady flow, and storage will be required. Every EV is a huge battery on wheels and if some if the battery capacity can be used for purposes other than purely propelling the car along the road, well, bring it on.
We only have to look at our electricity bill to know it works brilliantly for us, Tom. Over the last few weeks, when summer seems to have finally arrived, pur car has been making a profit for us most days. Our car just had its 3rd MOT Test (5 tears old) and the SOH of our battery is still over 92% and we are still seeing 230 miles on the GOM. Thank you for watching. Sheila.
Thank you fascinating - just a thought... as your car will export electricity to your house and also the grid (Is that correct ?) and as you have solar topping up your car... why not use that solar via your car battery for cooking and reduce your gas bills? It will be greener of course too. Which leads on to wether in the fullness of time a ASHP might replace all your gas use too!! Just a thought as you are clearly ahead of the game here.
All good points and certainly ones we think about. We recently bought an air fryer because it's crazy to heat up the oven - with gas - to cook a few oven chips. An air fryer needs almost zero warm-up time, uses zero fossil fuel (the solar panels or the car can easily supply enough juice for that) and it does a better job, too! I suspect we will change to electric cooking over time. We already have four air source heat pump units which go a long way to keeping us warm in winter and vice versa. Each unit gives us the equivalent of 4kw of resistive electric heating/cooling for 650 watts so even in winter the solar panels/car already do a lot of our heating. Picture: photos.app.goo.gl/wiEtCma2WvStpb2e9 We really are doing our best! :-) Thank you for watching and your comment. Sheila.
@@leoclarke6462 Hi, Leo, When I say four, we have four fan units in the house, one in the master bedroom, one in the living room, one in the 'office' and one in the conservatory (so we can use that as an extra room regardless of the weather). Things like this: photos.app.goo.gl/pr8GLYXGy143M4Z87 These are run by three compressor units outside the house, the two you saw in the previous picture and another at ground level on the other side of the house. You could not heat an entire house with one electric fan heater, and similarly, you need several fan units, spread around the house, to warm it all.
I haven't ploughed through all the comments to see if the odometer reading anomaly has been resolved, but I noticed that the 5456 mile reading on the form would correspond to 8780 kilometres. It looks as if someone entered the odometer reading on the car into the system as being kilometres instead of miles.
This error in inputting the car mileage would presumably influence the quality of any conclusions arrived at regarding the "treatment" of the battery (charging) and the degradation of the battery?
Hi, Alan, Thank you for your contribution. Please see the "- - - UPDATES - - -" in the video description above. Thank you for watching and taking the trouble to comment. Cheers, Sheila.
If you use Gas for Water heating perhaps you should look into a Heat Pump Solar Hot water System. Its like a reverse Fridge and only runs a fan. I don't know what your weather is like but if cold would perhaps be best inside. It does pump out Cold A/C air when the Fan is running. I've had one for 15 years. They have an initial high price but us very little electricity so some maths involved.
Hi, Keith, May we direct you to Leo Clarke's question of about a week ago and the conversation that followed? Just scroll down a bit. Cheers, Sheila and Stephen.
I agree that it has been slow to take off. We have visibly proven that V2G/H works brilliantly for all parties: the grid, the car, us, and the environment. Part of the problem is still a lack of a universal connector and protocol at the car end. Hopefully, this is now at least on the horizon. Nissan's 2025 Leaf will have CCS charging but a directional Type 2 socket and a bidirectional home charger as part of the purchase price. Keep the faith, Gino, it will happen. Thank you for watching and commenting, Sheila.
"Hey Grandma..." said with the utmost respect. i'm with ya regarding those webinar not letting you ask questions. i bet they were over their head since you/users have more experience. lots of charts, i'm not into charts, my nuclear engineer friend is. found this PDF file called A Closer Look at State of Charge (SOC) and State of Health (SOH) Estimation Techniques for Batteries if you google you will find it. if i add url link it won't be posted
With my local power utility, the argument was brought up that homes that deliver power to the grid are only providing the "power generation" portion of what the utility does. The Utility still has to do more than just power generation. They have to transport the power, and maintain the infrastructure. For this reason, it doesn't make sense for home owners to get paid the FULL price of electric power, since they're only providing PART of what it takes to deliver power.
Of course, you are correct. Maybe we'll see some sort of annual or monthly fee that covers maintaining the infrastructure, much as BT charges for a landline (or did.) Thank you for watching and commenting. Sheila.
Homeowners are not just providing power generation. Home owners have invested a lot of money(loans with interest) into this, and they are helping to balance the grid, which reduces the costs for running the grid. Also, remember solar panels, powerwalls, chargers, and evs needs service or maintenance, and they don't last forever. Sooner or later, new ones are needed. Even though I am not into the green movement, I think homeowners are doing a good job, and they must be paid full amount.
@fix-and-drive-diy-repairs So you completely ignore the REAL costs of everything beyond just generating. Transport, security, and maintenance just exist by magic to you.
@suserman7775 you mean the cost of buying and installing solar panels, buying and installing powerwalls, buying and installing chargers, converters, transformers, and buying electric cars and the cost of servicing and maintaining all these stuff? And, the cost of replacing them when they fail or get old. Both the grid and the homeowner have costs, and both should benefit.
@fix-and-drive-diy-repairs All the costs you mention are incurred for the power company's generation too. But the homeowner pays ZERO costs for transport and maintenance and security thereof. Different costs deserve different pay.
Only when you sell your used Leaf will you know whether you have lost or made money. Your choice on charging levels very sound. But remember all these battery cells have a declining life use, damaged by rapid large and severe discharge under load use. I look forward to your battery report in 12 years time. 👌
Hi, Brian, You are correct of course; only time will tell what the long-term effects of V2G are. However, bear in mind, if when driving I put my foot to the floor I am burning 160 kW out of the battery. That, I would agree, can be described as "rapid large and severe discharge under load" but the V2G charger only discharges at 6 kW absolute maximum and OVO limit export to around 3.5 kW so I don't think the battery is being stressed. Also, bear in mind, V2G does not affect Nissan's battery warranty which lasts 8 years and/or 100,000 miles. So, if after 8 years, V2G has unduly damaged the battery we can expect Nissan to replace it. We are certain V2G has kept our battery healthy during the lockdown periods. We'll release another video in November which will mark 2 years on V2G and the official end of our 2-year trial. We'll see how our battery has fared then, but it's still looking very positive so far. After that, we hope to join in with Indra's latest plan to test out "Load Balancing". :-) tinyurl.com/V2Hgraphic Thank you for watching and commenting.
A battery degrades even when you don't use it. The factor time is as important as charging/discharging. Good video, hope all cars support this soon with the new ISO 15118-II standard.
@@chrisminnoy3637 Hi, Chris, I can't actually find that ISO 15118-II standard with any reference to EVs. Could you provide a link, please? Thank you for watching and commenting.
Absolutely fascinating. Well done Sheila/all. 👏
Very interesting to see the effect on battery health of the V2G, that certainly is very reassuring. Great video!
Thank you for your kind comments.
Hello Shiela, firstly i wish to thank you for very interesting, informative and enjoyable videos. The clear manner you speak and explain the issues makes watching your videos so enjoyable.
I have solar panels and live in Spain, so generally manage to produce enough electricity to half my electricity bills. I only have a small house and my panels are on the roof. I would very much like to own an electric car but i find they are too expensive at the moment.
I will keep watching your interesting series of films. Thank you. Steve
Hello Steve,
We have been amazed by the difference having the car plugged in makes. Two days ago, the charger developed a fault around lunchtime but we did not notice until early evening when we rebooted it. The difference that day in our electricity bill was over £3.00! Keep looking out for a second-hand EV, the prices are very affordable now.
Thank you for watching and for your kind comments.
Sheila.
Hey Shelia , I have enjoyed watching your Journey to a greener future with your vehicle to grid technology and I’m so impressed that you were an early adopter both of the vehicle and the technology including solar .here in Australia we have just begun a similar trial in our capital ACT also using 50 62kw Nissan leafs as a test bed so hopefully it can become the norm here in Australia as we definitely have a surge use every evening when people need to use more power than is available and we are still running coal fired and natural gas generators.
We have the Highest number of solar panel arrays on private homes in the world second only to Sweden so this would be perfect for our climate. Again thanks for your informative videos
We have always thought your climate would be perfect for solar with V2G. The UK managed several months without any coal-fired generation last summer; this trend is now also starting to apply to gas. As far as we personally are concerned, due to V2G, our home is now carbon neutral which is great news.
Thank you for watching and taking the time to comment.
Sheila.
Early adaptation is nice. This is the future. Keep us updated.
Thank you for watching and your kind comment.
Oh my!! So magnificent!! Congratulations, real nice to see V2G in a pratical usage, with real data analysis!! Deserve an Own Series on Netflix!
Ha-ha! Wow, thank you so much for that comment. Stephen and I are delighted you find our videos enlightening. Thank you for subscribing also. S&S.
this is the cutest video of EV I've seen.. good on the lady for being so switched on
Thank you for watching and for your kind comment.
Excellent progress, I can see that V to G rolled out nationally should get over the problem of intermittent renewables, and most grid failures.
Hi Jim,
Thank you for your comments on all three videos; I am glad you enjoyed them and found them enlightening. I agree with you that V2G is vital to support the grid going forward.
Thank you also for subscribing, we will be making another video shortly.
Cheers,
Sheila
Very interesting analysis, thanks for sharing. We hope to follow your example when the technology becomes more widely available
Thank you for watching, Terry.
Sheila.
Here in the States, this idea is finally being implemented by the Ford Corp. I can't wait to have this done to my place as well. Bravo on renewables. OUTSTANDING! 🥳
I'd be interested to know how Ford will do this using a CCS connector. (Or maybe there is a separate V2G connector?)
So pleased it is happening anyway. FYI, here is a link to a short unlisted video showing our carbon footprint now we are helping the grid with V2G. ruclips.net/video/zDNCjTzgbiI/видео.html
Stumbled upon you researching electric vehicles because I love Tesla. Much love from Mississauga Canada!
Thank you and welcome aboard!
Ive just watched all 3 of your videos. Very detailed and understandable. I dont even have an electric car.🤣
When is the 4th episode coming?
There will be a fourth shortly. Our two-year trial has now ended but for the time being, we will stay with the same arrangement. We will however sum up all our figures for the entire 2 years. Then we'll see what happens next!
Thank you for watching.
Hello, Very informative video. Hanging out for the next episode. Interested to know the condition of your battery too as we don't have the technology in New Zealand yet and there are many doubters.
Hi, Tony,
We really must start on the next episode soon! We have waited because we have reached the end of our trial 2 years and we would like to be able to pass on what we do next. Indra has a Vehicle 2 Home (V2H) load-balancing project in the pipeline that we have offered to look at but right now, we're not sure that would work out to be more advantageous for us monetarily. We need to know a lot more before we jump ship away from OVO V2G.
Perhaps we need to make a brief overview of the last 2 years, answer a few questions then add a "what comes next" video later when our decision is made.
Thank you for your interest and your comment.
You are a pleasure to listen to, thank you!
Thank you for watching and your kind comment.
Any chance of an episode 4? Loving the series on V2G
Thank you so much for your comment, Laurence, that's a real compliment! :-)
We have been planning a fourth edition of course. We've been torn between doing one now when we have our first complete year of good quality data without any missing bits or waiting until November when our 2-year trial officially ends.
We also want to include the answers to many of the common questions we are asked in these comments. Perhaps the moment is nearing; your request has certainly reminded us we have subscribers eager to hear more!
Thank you for watching.
Sheila.
Hi I’ve just watched your 3 videos, very interesting, thank you. I see that your 2 year anniversary would have been about August 2021? Do you plan any further updates on your V2G experience?
Hi, Stephen,
We are planning to shoot an update in the not-too-distant future.
We have volunteered to join a trial for Indra's Vehicle 2 Home Load Balancing system but nothing's happened about that - yet. Right now, however, OVO is keeping us on the same tariff we have been on since the start of the trial so we're not about to change anything until we have a clear view of how that will impact us financially. We'd like the next video to include what we're going to do next but we seem to be in a bit of a limbo.
It will be interesting to see what OVO offer when the next price cap is removed later in the year. If the cost of electricity is going to rise dramatically, we would naturally expect to be paid more when exporting to the grid. We shall see!
Right now, we can pass on that after two and a half years of V2G and three years of driving 20,000 miles, our battery has a State of Health (SOH) of 94.6% and we are still seeing an estimated range of 230+ miles when fully charged which is pretty much what we started out with; we see this as being very positive.
Thank you for watching and commenting.
Cheers,
Sheila.
@@ElectrAA Hi Sheila, me from New Zealand. Thanks for the update.
It's been 2 years, but i've just watched it for the first time as i'm interessted in V2G as well. Great video, thanks!
I'm glad you found the video interesting Michel. Thank you for watching and commenting.
Sheila.
Looking forward to V2G options to come to the US.
We would like to see V2G and V2H being common across the planet! 🙂
Thank you for watching and commenting.
Sheila.
Great video, thanks for all the information. I'm about to purchase a 40kwh model and am considering V2G. I'd be interested to see an update. Or even if you could post your current leafspy data so we can see how your battery health has changed compared to cars that don't use v2g.
Our car is now over two and half years old and is still continuously connected to V2G when at home - which is most of the time - we've retired, so there is no daily commute for us!
We're working on a latest-figures-only update at the moment but the headline is that despite V2G using the battery probably four or fives times as much as we have in driving, our current state of health is around 94.6% Typically, right now, we are seeing an estimated range of 225 - 230 miles.
Thanks for watching and commenting, Matt.
Hi, I have registered my interest with Indra for their upcoming V2H trials. Like many people, I am a little apprehensive about the effects of this type of system on battery health of a Leaf but was very interested to see your SOH figures had been largely unaffected after 12 months. As you have now been using a V2X system for three years it would be very useful for an update, particularly your thoughts and stats on battery health. Thank you 👍
Watch this space . . . 🙂
Thank you for watching.
@@ElectrAA Thank you so much, the Indra trial applications close at the end of this month so no pressure! 🙂
Seriously love your videos
Fantastic video series. Thanks so much. I’m interested in the tariffs. I noticed your reply to another comment was a flat rate import price of 14p, and an export price of 32p. That seems very advantageous.
Did your energy supplier agree this as it is a trial? Before you had V2G and only had solar, I would have expected your export tariff around 5p. Why the sudden increase?
Lastly, I suppose it would be interesting to know if you had to put up all the capital for the installation, and what your payback period is roughly looking like? If because it was a trial there was a cost share, it’d be interesting to know roughly what it would be if the homeowner had to finance the whole thing.
Cheers
Nick (in the U.K.)
Hi, Nick,
The tariffs are a flat rate and were set by OVO at the beginning of the trial, except originally it was 14p to import and 26p to export. When electricity prices went through the roof recently, OVO spontaneously and voluntarily raised our export rate to 32p per kWh which we thought was very generous of them. As far as we know, every household on the OVO trial that has both V2G and solar panels is on the same rate as us. We'll see what happens in September when our current agreement comes to an end. At that point, we may opt out of V2G or move more towards V2H with Indra's new load-balancing scheme. We'll see!
We did not pay for this installation. If we had had to, being pensioners, we probably could not have afforded it. The trial we are on is part of a government-funded V2G trial of 330 UK households right across the country. We can only estimate or guess what the costs would have been and our best guess would probably be somewhere around the £5k - £6k mark. Having said that, OVO actually paid us £989.72 last calendar year so, at our current flat rates, payback in a reasonable timeframe would not be impossible.
Thank you for watching and commenting.
Sheila.
Thanks for the quick reply. Great stuff. I’ll look into V2H as well. Never heard of it
Fantastic videos. I've seen a few naysayers discussing V2G as a theoretical pipe dream, and your channel ha's been a great resource to point them to as real world examples of it successfully in action.
Sounds like there's a few kinks to iron out, but overall seems like a positive outcome? Did you have to pay for the installation if V2G?
Hi, Lord B,
No, we did not have to pay for the installation. If you watched our first video you can see it would probably have cost a few thousand pounds. This is, we believe, the world's largest V2G trial. It is subsidised by the UK government and currently has over 300 vehicles connected. We believe the next largest scheme is in Australia which is with just 30 Nissan Leafs.
Thank you for watching and we're glad you are showing our video to others - please keep doing so! :-)
Again, great informative video. We have had our V2G system nearly 6 months and was installed just before lockdown. We don't have solar but do have 2 EVs, a 2013 Leaf 24 and a 2020 Leaf 40. So we charge both cars using the system and swap from time to time to take turns in exporting. OVOs billing as you say is very confusing and does not give a figure for exported energy on the bill but Kaluza app does. I was concerned that I may end up spending more on charging compared to our previous E7 tariff but currently over £200 in credit and my monthly payments stayed the same, so go figure...it's working for me 👍 Thanks for the video, and look forward to the next installment.
We're glad you're finding V2G as worthwhile as we are. Thank you for watching.
Thank you for an incredibly informative video!
Thank you for watching and for your kind comment.
Excellent video, thank you!
Fantastic video! Well done and I'd love to know the answers to the battery health question.
Let us know if you find out, Simon! :-)
I appreciate the video! Btw, regarding your question about why the mileage doesn’t match, it’s because one of them is mislabeled - the 8781 figure should be kilometers, not miles (8781 km = 5456 miles). Hope that helps solve at least one of the mysteries, haha. =)
Hi, Michael,
Embarrassingly, my brother worked out the miles/kilometres thing within an hour of the video going live! :-) We did mention this in the video description.
In fact, the car odometer is, of course, correct - we did drive over 8,000 miles - but the software thinks the figure is in kilometres and tries to be helpful and converts it, erroneously, to the figure shown.
Thank you for watching and commenting.
Sheila.
Great post...thanks for the detailed breakdown.
Thank you for watching and commenting.
Enjoyed the video simple and very informative. Hope one day the technology and service arrives to Texas,USA. You should contact Robert at fully charged and let him V2grid is happening in UK.
Robert Llewellyn spoke at the very first ElectrAA event in Malvern in 2014 and it was on his advice that we bought our first Nissan Leaf that year as our first EV purchase. Robert has done a few videos on Vehicle to Grid. Here are a couple of links for you: ruclips.net/video/QCYcsk40FLs/видео.html -- ruclips.net/video/qLE2SrDNPZc/видео.html In the second video you will see on the right Mike Schooling of Indra who is seen in our video when we took our 62kWh Leaf to test it out with V2G for the first time.
Hi Sheila,
Great video series, I'm looking forward to the newest update :)
Is the power drawn from the car while the V2G operation dynamic or at a static level, like continuous for 5kW?
Hi, Roman,
The day-to-day charging and discharging of the vehicle is done at the command of our electricity supplier - OVO.
As we understand it, wholesale electricity is sold in half-hour increments. Each supplier tries to estimate what their demand will be in any/every half-hour time slot. if they under, or overestimate, they are charged more. So, if they have underestimated the demand, they will instruct all the vehicles attached to V2G to start charging - to use more and meet their estimate. Similarly, if they overestimated they will instruct the cares to send electricity to the grid - so they draw less from the national grid and again, try to meet their estimate.
Have a close look at the graphs at around 3 minutes into the video, charging and discharging can happen at odd intervals and times according to the needs of the grid and our electricity supplier.
Added to this, in general, they will charge the car while electricity is cheap and green in the small hours and sell it back during peak times. This is to try to "flatten" the load on the grid across the 24-hour day-night cycle. It's also how we make the majority of our money from the scheme!
While doing this, the software still obeys our requirements of course - that come what may, we will always have 35% left in the battery and we don't wish the car to charge beyond 75% unless we "boost" it to 100% in anticipation of a long journey.
Thank you for watching,
Sheila.
"2020 has been a odd year..."
This comment should win "Most understated statement of the year award"
This seems liek a pretty neat system btw, I stumbled across your channel by accident. You remind me of my mum, cept you're nicer. lol Keep it up and i'll come back for the updates. Subbed
I'm sure your Mum is lovely Michael, but thank you for the compliment. And thank you for subscribing also; we don't make videos very often but when we do we try to pack in a lot of information. The next one will be at the end of the year and our first full year with V2G.
Thank you for this video, it really is very informative, and what a great project. I'd love to see this technology take a major role in the ecological energy transition. You asked viewers if they had any ideas about the odometer observation. I think it might just be an error in the "untis" on the car's display. Doing a quick conversion calculation it seems to me that the car is very possibly displaying kilometres but giving it a "miles" label. I do hope your V2G proves to be a durable energy option, and thank you again for sharing this story.
Oops, now that I have opened up the intro text I see you have discovered that as well.
@@TC-ch1ms Thank you for your kind comments. Yes, the miles/kilometres thing was spotted by my brother within a couple of hours which was a bit embarrassing! :-) The car's mileage is the correct actual figure for distance travelled during the year. Thank you for watching.
Great job. Keep it coming... Free The Data and your mind will follow
That's our philosophy, too. Win hearts and minds by telling it how it is. :-)
@@ElectrAA jetcharge.com.au/services/vehicle-to-grid we are planning to use Solar Panels + 40kWh in the Nissan Leaf + the #Wallbox #Quasar. hopefully would deliver the same result as yours
@@l33tr4n55 Hopefully, yes - or as Australia is (generally speaking) sunnier than the UK, maybe even better. Good luck - make a video about it! :-)
@@ElectrAA Great idea. i will keep that in mind. thank you for sharing
How are you finding V2G today? Now thing are starting to return to normal .
Hi,
V2G is still just great, thank you.
I think total normality is still a bit out of reach, but we're heading in the right direction.
We will be trying to find some time to shoot a roundup of our first two complete years with V2G shortly.
Thank you for watching and commenting.
Here in Australia, we only have one Nissan Leaf available. Any thoughts on the usefulness of V2G with a smaller capacity car battery? Really appreciate your videos, BTW 😊
Hi, Roslyn,
It is technically possible to participate in V2G with an original 2010 24kWh Leaf. In fact, Mike Schooling, CEO of Indra, the company that designed the charger/inverter we use, has taken a 24kWh leaf to his home and used it with his own V2G system. However, you probably would not want to do this, because to give the grid enough battery capacity to make V2G worthwhile, it would not leave sufficient in the car battery for emergencies.
Thus, one of the rules of the OVO/Kaluza/Indra/Nissan trial we are involved in is that you must have a 30kWh Leaf to participate in the trial. Our new Leaf is 62kWh, so that's fine as we can happily let our battery drain to 35% and still be certain of 80 miles range in case of emergencies. If we ever had to do a longer journey than that in a hurry, 80 miles range gives us a choice of rapid chargers we could use en route.
So, the answer is you really need a 30kWh battery or larger to be sensible. I wonder what you mean by "We only have one Nissan leaf available". Do you not have the new(ish) E+ 3.Zero / N-Connecta Leaf over there?
@@ElectrAA - another AUstralian here. The current situation is that Nissan Australia brings in both the 40 and 62kWH models. However like NZ there is also a large market in used Japanese Leafs, which include the earlier verisons. There's also a (very) few Australian delivered early ones hanging around.
Thank you: this video was excellently made and strikingly clear.
Thank you for watching, taking the time to comment and for your kind words, Michael.
Sheila.
Christian from EV2Power.co.uk
commented by email . . .
Hi Sheila - I love all your videos and have been following your progress.
I hope you don't mind but I have added a link to these videos to a couple of websites I look after - the first is The Wiltshire Climate Alliance and the second is EV2Power.co.uk do let me know if you would rather I take them off but I hope that you will agree that people need to hear the message that EVs have so much potential to reduce carbon emissions.
Thanks again for putting together the videos which are so well put together.
Christian.
Hi, Christian,
Of course, you can include links to our videos in your sites. The more people learn about this sort of technology the more they will press for it to become mainstream.
Good luck with EV2Power, it looks like an interesting addition to a fossil fuel-free future.
Sheila.
Hi, great video, which charger do you have installed that allows for vehicle to grid?
Hi, Jonathon,
This one: www.indra.co.uk/vehicle-to-grid-charger
The charger is not the whole picture though. You need to be on a V2G scheme with your electricity supplier to take advantage of Vehicle to Grid. See our first video to find out how many companies were involved in setting us up.
Thank you for watching.
Awesome study, would love to see more!
Hi, Devon, what sort of "more" would you like to see? We're always open to suggestions for more videos.
@@ElectrAA You're the only channel I've seen that really covers the Vehicle to Grid in a practical sense so I'd be interested in watching any content on it, pros/cons of having it, integration with solar panels and ev. It would be time consuming but it would be cool to see the differences with the various battery level settings, like the 35%-70% setting.
@@ElSegador99 We'll bear that in mind! Maybe we should do some experiments but as the car seems to be behaving itself very well, we're reluctant to change things too much!
Hello, Good video, answered a lot of questions. Does the charger make a sound or even a noise when operating? Does it get warm or hot? Thank you…!
Hi, Kees,
The charger is silent. There is no noise other than in very hot weather there is an internal fan that might switch on occasionally to cool the electronics. However, we have never heard it ourselves and we only know of its existence because it comes on for a second or two as part of the self-test if the unit is restarted or rebooted.
Externally, we can discern no heat regardless of whether the unit is charging the car or sending electricity to the grid.
Thank you for watching and commenting.
Would be nice to have another update to see how it’s all working with the huge price hikes and if it really working for you. Interesting
Thank you for watching and commenting, NIck. We'll see what we can do. :-)
Will be great if it can do the same vehicle to grid vv at other place with incentive for doing so.. For example at a hotel we choose to stay
Can you share your total kwh brought from the grid each month and Solar production per month and sold to the grid each month.
Also how many kW is your solar install.
Our solar panels are a standard 16-panel 4kW array. The only oddity is that our roofs face East-West so we have 10 panels at the rear of the house (East) and six in the front (West).
Your other question is a bit harder to answer because OVO makes no distinction between the power sent to the grid by the car and that sent by the solar panels. Kaluza supplies a great deal of data, but frankly, much of it makes little sense. You are welcome to see these two spreadsheets showing Kaluza's data for August 2020 and January 2021. See if you can make any sense of "zero export to the grid" as quite clearly, we are being paid for many kWh sent to the grid by the car each month. The one aspect of all this that does not work well is the accounting!
drive.google.com/file/d/12Ir-66dEy6WX1FcOZ6eHtsdnwGohc8Q1/view?usp=sharing
drive.google.com/file/d/13UpXIy5px-80y2ces-BNa3o3C-xmkZFs/view?usp=sharing
Thank you for watching.
Hello! Give you respect from Korea! :) I'm intested in V2G recently and your video is so helpful. Thank you so much and please keep uploading video about v2g haha 😄. Take care and good luck!
Thank you for your kind words. We are very pleased you are enjoying our videos. Thank you for watching.
Really informative thank you. Do you use the power exclusively for export to the grid or do you also use the battery power to power your home as well? Thank you
After dark, when our solar panels are not generating and the car is sending electricity to the grid, what reaches the grid is what is left after our house has taken what it needs.
Have another look at this short section of our second video which explains how the system works. ruclips.net/video/pq_aQwWAK4o/видео.html
Also, we have a short video that demonstrates this in action. You are welcome to view it at ruclips.net/video/gbk7sAsD_GE/видео.html
Thank you for watching and commenting.
Cheers,
Sheila.
Thanks so much!
Hi Sheila, do you mind if I share this video as part of some case studies to support COP26?
Of course you may!
The prime reason we wanted to be on the V2G trial was to help blaze a trail for this sort of technology. We warmly welcome as much sharing of information about V2G, V2H, V2L and allied technologies as possible. Please feel free - anyone - to use and share our videos.
Thank you for watching and commenting.
Sheila.
How'd you get on Alex?
Thank you for the video I think your channel is the only one talking about this system. I liked you transparency. The V to G system that you are using is it specific to your new Leaf? I own a 2017 Chevy Bolt and I’m interested in having a similar setup with my current vehicle or a future vehicle.
Thank you for your kind comments. Our V2G system is specific to the Leaf in that V2G only works with the CHAdeMO connector and where the vehicle has been engineered for both charge and discharge through the connector. Even the original 2010 Leaf was so designed. Certainly, in the trial we are in, one of the stipulations is that currently, a Leaf with a battery capacity of 30kWh or more are the only vehicles they will accept.
The Bolt EV uses the SAE Combined Charging Standard (CCS) Combo connector for DC fast charging. Neither Type 2 nor CCS is bi-directional and Indra tell us there won't be a bi-directional revision of the CCS standard until around 2025 - 2026. So, you can't do Vehicle to Grid yet I'm afraid, but remember to ask the question when you change cars next time! It will come - because it has to! :-)
Great video. I'll start this autumn with V2H with the Nissan Leaf 62 kWh. Can you give us an update of your experience? Thanks for sharing your work ;)
Nice greetings from Bavaria.
Hi, Klaus,
We will be making our next video in November at the end of our two year V2G trial. We hope at this time to also be able to say what's next - we would like to join in with another trial that is essentially V2H but including load balancing, the idea being to import as little as possible from the grid at all times. Watch this space! :-)
Thank you for watching.
@@ElectrAA That would be great. V2H with this configuration is my future goal - in combination with photovoltaics. I am looking forward to it. You're welcome.
@@klausfreytag8243 Hey, me too. Do you have any good resources. I've just started my way on this. Thanks
2 mile to Tesco and back during Lockdown .....
So how did you manage 8,781 per year .... average 169 per week?
We bought the car in November 2019 and drove it normally until March when PM restricted all non-essential driving. These restrictions were lifted piecemeal later that year but by July we were driving fairly normally again. See: www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/chart-images/timeline-coronavirus-lockdown-december-2021_0.png
Splendid video! In Belgium it's unknown... V2G... Unbelievable...
Hi, Geert,
Thank you for watching and your kind comment. I'm sure V2G will reach all countries eventually. Write to your government's Minister for Transport and suggest it!
Utrecht in the Netherlands has a project which uses a huge solar roof above a car park that currently has around 250 cars, which t they hope to increase to 450 very soon that those vehicles will all be fully charged by the solar panels PLUS he able to supply the grid network to have an income to offset the cost of the solar roof.
Well done & thank you for sharing! When does the pilot end & do you plan to keep V2G?
Each individual user gets two years with the V2G trial, so ours will expire in November this year - two years after our installation.
We will certainly keep using the system as long as we can. OVO and Kaluza have promised to keep the software running until at least 2023.
Thank you for watching.
Thanks for the interesting and valuable information. Do we need 2 equipment ? (charging and discharging or just one equipment). thanks
Both functions are contained in the single unit you see on the wall.
The word 'charger' is actually incorrect. The 7kW charger is actually in the car, the charging part of the unit in the wall is actually just an intelligent power supply to the car (an EVSE - Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment). The wall unit does however have an inverter within it. This is the equipment that takes the DC voltage from the battery and converts it into (up to) 6kW of 240volt 50Hz alternating current in synchronisation with the grid.
That's the long (correct) answer, the simple one is no, the one unit on the wall does both. :-)
Thank you for watching and for your question.
Is there any way you can cap the number of charging and discharging cycle on your car into the V2G installation?
HI, Adel, no there isn't, but we don't see the number of charges as being a problem.
When we dropped our "Ready By" requirement, the car charged and discharged to support the grid. Many of those charges (and discharges) were for just a few dozen Watthours. I suppose if we put the "Ready By" setting back this wouild limit the number of charges, (as per the first set of graphs we showed in the video). However, if you think about it, every time you brake or go downhill in the Leaf the car switches into charging mode! This could happen dozens of times per hour while driving. I don't think the number of charges is a problem.
Thank you for watching and your question.
I wasn’t aware of v2g but your videos have proved interesting to watch and I’m looking forward to the next ones.
Thank you! We don't make them too often, but we try to cram in a lot of information when we do. :-)
Do you have battery storage excluding the leaf and what size?
No, we don't. We did investigate batteries, even before we had our first Leaf in 2014, but it was difficult to make a financial case for it. The car IS our battery and we have no plans to alter that in the near future. Thank you for watching! :-)
Firstly WOW. Sheila you are a captivating person , your voice is beautiful. If you are not doing voice overs as a business you should start now!!!! On to the main question. Do you have a COST for changing to a three phase installation or was this payed for by ovo energy ? I am looking at V2G in the near future. Are nissan the only manufacturer to adopt this on their vehicle?
Hi, Dave,
Thank you for watching and for your kind comments.
Firstly, we're not on 3 phase, the groundworks by Western Power and Keir was just to give us our own individual single-phase electricity supply, separated from our neighbour. We now have our own 100Amp cable from the street (fused at 80 Amps) directly to our meter box.
Secondly, we didn't pay for all that work. If we had had to, I doubt we could have afforded it. The money came from a government-funded scheme to trial V2G with 300 OVO energy users. The scheme runs for two years for each individual subscriber, but OVO plans to keep it going until 2023 at least.
The answer to your final question is a bit longer. Nissan is a leader in the CHAdeMO Consortium - the body that developed the CHAdeMO standard back in the early 2000s. Any vehicle with a CHAdeMO connector is technically capable of working with V2G. At the moment, only CHAdeMO is 'two-way' allowing current from the battery to be sent out of the car connector. In our case, this goes to the OVO/Indra unit (which includes a 6kW inverter) which inserts 50Hz synchronised mains electricity into the grid.
CHAdeMO is, however, not the preferred European connector and CCS is becoming the European standard. CCS is charge-only and cannot, therefore, do V2G at this time. We expect to see a revision to the CCS technology and protocol to appear in 2025/2026 that will be bi-directional. There is, in fact, a combined CHAdeMO/CCS connector called Chaoji! We're just waiting and watching at the moment to see what develops. For the next five-six years at least, a vehicle with CHAdeMO is your only option if you wish to do V2G. Right now, there is really only one sensible vehicle to buy if you wish to do V2G and that is the Nissan Leaf. Any past or present model with a 30kWh battery or larger should be acceptable. (The early 24kWh vehicles are V2G-capable, but their use with V2G would be limited and certainly leave too-small a mileage in the battery for emergencies.)
However . . . even given the right car, there are not many opportunities to join a V2G scheme at this time. The OVO scheme has now closed to new accounts, Octopus Energy is running a trial but only in Kent and the Southeast and that will cease taking on new people in March 2021.
Basically, talk to your preferred electricity provider to see what they are doing or planning and keep your ear to the ground!
Good luck and thank you for your question.
@@ElectrAA Thank you for this information , even though i follow every thing to do with solar EVs and V2G i didnt know about these trials , you should be on fully charged show
@@rodden1953 Robert Llewellyn has spoken at a couple of ElectrAA events. He has done quite a few videos on V2G, if you search within his channel you will find them. Thank you for watching.
thanks for video, interesting and good to hear and see. Could be wrong, SOH is the loss of battery capacity. 100% SOH = 62kWh. 0% SOH = 80% of original capacity. 0% SOH = 49.6kWh (80% of 49.6). The battery health could be the internal battery impedance. started out at 100% which is say 10mohms. Over time if it gets to double then they consider end of life. 200% = 20mohms. 112.68% would now be 11.268mohms.
Aha!. We hadn't thought of that.
You may well be right and it's certainly the best explanation so far. Thank you for taking the time to watch and comment.
Sheila.
Hi,
Excellent video, it's really insightful to see the details and realities of V2G in action. I have a question regarding tariffs, as you are discharging to the grid at peak times and charging during the hours with lower demand, does OVO offer you a variable tariff based on the half hourly market price of the electricity you use/export? Thanks
Hi, Jamie, the simple answer is no. Part of the agreement to being on the OVO trial is that we are on a flat rate both for import and export. We pay approximately 14p per kWh for all our electricity and receive 26p per kWh when sending power to the grid - regardless of time or season. We are on the 26p rate because we have solar panels and anything sent to the grid from those is also paid at 26p per kWh - far better than the government rate. If we did not have the solar panels, the OVO export rate would be 30p per kWh - but we're not complaining!
Thank you for watching and your question.
@@ElectrAA Thanks for the reply, this is very interesting. Are these flat rate prices then conditional to you using the Kaluza app to decide the times at which the car discharges?
@@jkefunk The whole deal is a package, you get the free charger, the Kaluza App and the OVO flat rate account. Remember, this is all very experimental at the moment, so I guess they're keeping it simple. The prospect of accounting for multiple rates for both import and export to the grid on a half-hour time block basis for hundreds of users, each with different needs and different app settings must be pretty horrifying. It will come of course, but this project is primarily to establish the viability of it. We could be stricter with the app settings but as we explained, at the moment, we're not joy-riding in the car a lot :-( so we might as well let the app manage things to the best benefit of the grid.
Could I use this in a similar fashion as a solar battery ? I don't want to pump any of the energy into the grid but I want it to supply power to my house when the sun isn't out, like at night.
Yes, that is what Vehicle to Home - V2H - is all about.
All that really changes between V2G and V2H is the software, the hardware can be exactly the same. Have a look at this Nissan Video for an idea of how that works in Japan where they do it a lot. ruclips.net/video/x78XGElU2I0/видео.html
The difference between using the car and a static battery is of course that when the car is away from home it can neither charge nor supply power to the house, so you have to take into account your personal car usage habits.
See also our most recent video where we show and talk about this. ruclips.net/video/JcGdy66f3Kc/видео.html
Thank you for watching.
Sheila.
Hi thank you for the information how much was the v2g unit
Hi, Ben, thank you for watching and commenting.
Thankfully, we did not have to pay for the installation. If you watched our first video you can see it would probably have cost a few thousand pounds! This is part of the world's largest V2G trial. It is subsidised by the UK government and currently has around 330 vehicles connected.
Which wall box do you use ? I have found only the "wallbox quasar" for the bidirectional charge
Hi, Davide,
This one: www.indra.co.uk/v2g It was supplied to us as part of the OVO, Indra, Kaluza trial of 330 UK households.
Thank you for watching and commenting.
Thanks a lot for the answer. I contacted them but unfortunately they don't ship to Italy. We hope in the future something will move here too!
@@davideandreatta3768 Fingers crossed for you. :-)
Really looking forward to your next video . liked and subscribed
Thank you for subscribing.
Hiya. I'm one of the forum volunteers over at the OVO Forum. It's great to see you're getting on really well with V2G. Would you be OK with me letting the Community Manager know about this? I think he'd be very interested.
Hi,
If you're talking about Tim, I think you'll find he already knows us pretty well - Sheila as herself of course and me as Stephen Bell. V2G forum questions sometimes get referred to us for an opinion or comment. Ovo also put us in touch with the Sunday Times recently, so we should be appearing in that shortly.
Thank you for watching and taking the time to comment.
So wat is battery if health all about? Anyone?
We would all like to know that but nobody has come back with an answer - yet! :-) Thank you for watching.
State of Charge is the potential capacity of the battery cells, State of Health is the real world usable capacity compared to new.. so probably the only one worth bothering about as a driver.
So what happens now that OVO have closed the scheme to new entrants?
HI, Paul, this was always a test - a trial scheme. I did ask the question of OVO and I'm sure they won't mind me repeating their answer here. They said:
"We’ve confirmed that the 2 year trial period for the V2G charger started when your V2G unit was installed. Once you get to the end of your two years, you will be given the chance to buy the charger for £0.01, or we can remove it for you. The charger will continue to work in the same way after your two years if you take ownership of it: we plan to continue supporting the app until at least January 2023.
We hope that the majority of members will stay with OVO and our V2G propositions beyond the end of their 2-year trial so that we can continue providing support to the grid together.
There have also been some questions about V2G as a concept and how OVO plans to develop this in the future. There are some open questions about future V2G technology, particularly around support for CCS V2G. We’re following this as it evolves to inform our future V2G offering."
Any update?
Currently in preparation . . . and there are a few surprises!
Thank you for watching.
have you try Car scanner app at google play for SOH?
Hi, Aung,
You probably mean LeafSpy Pro - which is exactly what we did use. [ play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Turbo3.Leaf_Spy_Pro&hl=en-GB ]
As far as we know, there is no other, better or more accurate option. The graphs we show come directly from the app.
Thank you for watching.
Great video!
Thank you for watching and your kind comment.
First of all, thanks for sharing this experience with us !! The explanation was very educational, I appreciate the plain and simple arguing. But at the end of the video there are some lose ends that make me feel this system is not yet working in its perfection. I agree with your concern on contradictory data reports, precisely on key figures that make a difference to assess the good performance of the system !! The miles discrepancy could very well be a mathematics conversion error to km. But the increasing battery life value over time and usage ? Anything above 100% must be an error in the software calculation. Also I still have my doubts on the wear&tear of your car battery after a number of charge-discharge cycles: it is obviously not counting well, again probably the software is underestimating the reality. My main concern on a V2G system is the slowly reduced loading capacity, eventually ending up the battery life (would it swell?). I would appreciate if in your next video by Xmas you may address these important issues for our information. Thanks very much for the time you dedicate to this experience !!!
Thank you for your comments and questions.
The single most important statistic reported by the car and Leaf Spy is State of Health - SOH. That is the only one worth our attention. SOH does what it says on the tin - shows how healthy the battery is. That other "battery health" figure amused us, but we pay it no credence and so far nobody has been able to tell us what it means!
You commented, "My main concern on a V2G system is the slowly reduced loading capacity..." Bear in mind, V2G does not invalidate Nissan's battery warranty. That fact alone is a huge comfort in letting our car and its battery be used in this way. We genuinely believe we have lost 1.6% or just over 3 miles of our range. Given the lack of vehicle use during this strange year we genuinely believe V2G has helped maintain the battery. Have a look at these links - and try not to be so pessimistic! :-)
is.gd/V2GLink1
is.gd/V2GLink2
is.gd/V2GLink3
Our next video may well wait until March. If you watch the 3 months video, you will have seen that nothing settled down until March this year so to get a true idea of a complete year, we think we should wait a while.
The discrepancy in the odometer is explained in the video description.
Thank you for watching.
S & S
I thought nissan will put up the v2g device?
Hi, Tal,
Nissan is a car manufacturer. Its part in V2G ceased when they designed the original Nissan leaf with a CHAdeMO connector that could work both from, and to, the electric grid. Nissan has no interest in the National Grid, software or the electronic hardware required for V2G.
V2G needs a combination of the right vehicle with the right battery and the right connector (Nissan's part) plus the electronic hardware that is both a rectifier and an inverter (that's Indra's contribution) plus the software to communicate between the grid, the charger and the car and manage the whole process (written by Kaluza) and the electricity supply company to command the system to its best advantage, manage the data and the accounting (OVO).
In our case, we also had the assistance of Kier who did all the Groundworks and Western Power who had to re-cable our house and make a new connection to the electricity mains in the street (see part 1 of this series for more about that).
A car manufacturer is not in a position to do all that!
Thank you for watching.
Can we configure the V2G to use the car's battery on a specific timeframe?
And also configure the V2G to charge the car only between a certain time frame?
Hi, Helder,
The simple answer is no. Not because it's not possible - just about anything is possible with technology, but because the whole point of V2G is that the grid uses the charge in the car when it needs to and charges the car when it needs to use more electricity. On different days this will occur at different times and for different numbers of Kilowatt Hours. To understand why an energy supplier such as OVO might wish to tell our system to charge or discharge, back and forth, at many different times a day, you need to understand the bidding process for electricity. That's way beyond the scope of this answer but you could try Googling for 'Bidding for electricity in the UK'.
I guess you are asking the question because you wish to take advantage of low-cost electricity and charge the car at those times. This is what V2G does anyway. We pay 14pence per kWh imported and we are paid 26 pence per kWh exported - and that includes the electricity from our solar panels. Admittedly, this is a flat rate scheme, but frankly, the complexities of running V2G together with continually changing rates of charge and payment would be mind-boggling. Again, of course, it's possible because anything is, but let's get this trial under our belts first!
Thank you for watching and your question.
@@ElectrAA correct, we have no solar panels but we have cheap electricity from the grid between 10pm and 8am. Our highest consumption is during the day, (outside of that cheap period) and is about 12kW. So last night I found myself thinking what if I could use an electric car to store the power during the night and run the whole house on the car's battery during the day?! First results on google, your video popped up :) thanks. I didnt know this was possible/accessible to consumers. I will be really looking into this now. We could cut our electricity bill in half with that V2G unit or a similar one, specially if would allow us to control times for G2V and schedule when the unit does V2House.
Thanks again and happy new year.
@@HelderNevesHelderNeves You're actually talking about Vehicle to Home - V2H - which is subtly different. V2G is primarily about supporting the grid, being environmentally friendly and giving consumers lower pricing for their electricity and/or allowing them essentially to have free travel. V2H is to do exactly what you are suggesting. Have a look at this video: ruclips.net/video/x78XGElU2I0/видео.html V2G is not quite what you're after. Ask your preferred electricity supplier what they can offer.
Good luck - make a video about it!
Sheila.
@@ElectrAALink no longer works 😢. Any idea what it was called or who made it available? Might just be a search away 🤞
@@matbowden9156 HI, Mat, I have answered more fully on another video comment but the website is closed now, sorry.
Sheila.
Interesting! Did Ovo not go bankrupt though?
No, OVO is one of the ones still going strong. Thankfully we just extended our contract until the end of the year at today's rates, too!
You seem to be getting a good price for export. Here in New Zealand the rates are so low it’s not worth exporting.
See episode 4! 😊
Hi, Chris,
We were getting a good price for export but the recent energy shortages and massive price rises have put paid to a lot of that. Please watch the latest episode for our most recent update.
Thank you for watching.
Sheila.
How much have you saved in cheaper electricity?
I'm not sure I can answer this simply. A sample of our figures can be seen in the video. It's difficult to single out "cheaper electricity" because what we pay is the result of what we spend plus what our solar panels generate plus what the Grid (via OVO) pays us for the solar energy and V2G export.
During the last 12 months, our income from V2G was £989.93 but we obviously paid for a lot of electricity and of course, we used what our solar panels generated. Overall, during the summer months, we make a profit and that includes all our energy including the gas we use.
Our rates from OVO are (as mentioned) a flat rate. Right now (November 2021) because energy is very expensive, we are paying 14p per kWh when we import from the grid but we are paid 31p per kWh when we export. Maybe that answers your question?
Thank you for watching.
Sheila.
Could you run this alongside economy 7. So you buy overnight at 5p per kWh and sell back at peak times! I guess you would need a second grid connection and you would pay a second standing charge for that.
I'm not sure how that could work - how would the two companies split the charges? - they would need to cooperate and that's not going to happen when OVO have invested so much into this trial. Remember, we had all this installed for free and one of the stipulations on which this works is that we have to be on the OVO Flat Rate Tariff. To be frank with you, this is as much about the future of electricity generation and management, ecology and the environment as it is about us making money; we're making a profit during the summer months already - let's not be too greedy! :-)
@@ElectrAA yes quite, I think some people charge their car and fill powerwall on economy 7 and use powerwall and solar to avoid the peak time charges. But as for selling back with V2G as well 😀
will ccs use vehicle to grid i had a 2019 leaf i love the leaf now i drive a mustang mach e
Hi, Samurai,
CCS does not support V2G or V2H. At the moment CCS is one-way only.
This is expected to change around 2025-2026 when the CCS protocols and technology are expected to be upgraded to do this. However, this does not mean any car manufactured previously with CCS will then be able to support V2G. Only vehicles made with the new CCS technology onboard will be able to do this.
(This does show how far ahead Nissan and the CHAdeMO Consortium were when the first Leaf was sold back in 2010.)
It will come but I'm afraid your lovely new Mustang won't be able to join in.
Thank you for watching and commenting.
Sheila.
@@ElectrAA gotcha just was curious i saw the new volvo ev car
@@ElectrAA now does j1772 support vehicle to grid
@@ElectrAA was a great video
@@SamuraiTacos1 No, it's what we would call a Type 1 connector as used on the original Nissan Leaf primarily for home charging. There's an article describing it here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAE_J1772 . Interestingly, Type 1 became the basis of the CCS system.
I heard that "Bat Health", is versus a graph of expected lifespan. It's says at 2 years your battery should be some voltage at rest. So being in the plus means your resting voltage is higher than expected.
Hi, David, so is that good or bad? :-)
@@ElectrAA means your battery is doing better than the engineers originally expected
@@davidsharp9166 Aha! Thank you. Why don't Nissan tell us this? :-)
Thank you for watching and commenting.
Luckily you didn't choose a Chevy Bolt. The whole V2G experiment would be a dumpster fire, literally! 🔥
This has to be the way to go. We all know that renewables cannot supply a steady flow, and storage will be required. Every EV is a huge battery on wheels and if some if the battery capacity can be used for purposes other than purely propelling the car along the road, well, bring it on.
We only have to look at our electricity bill to know it works brilliantly for us, Tom. Over the last few weeks, when summer seems to have finally arrived, pur car has been making a profit for us most days. Our car just had its 3rd MOT Test (5 tears old) and the SOH of our battery is still over 92% and we are still seeing 230 miles on the GOM.
Thank you for watching.
Sheila.
Thank you fascinating - just a thought... as your car will export electricity to your house and also the grid
(Is that correct ?) and as you have solar topping up your car... why not use that solar via your car battery for cooking and reduce your gas bills? It will be greener of course too. Which leads on to wether in the fullness of time a ASHP might replace all your gas use too!! Just a thought as you are clearly ahead of the game here.
All good points and certainly ones we think about. We recently bought an air fryer because it's crazy to heat up the oven - with gas - to cook a few oven chips. An air fryer needs almost zero warm-up time, uses zero fossil fuel (the solar panels or the car can easily supply enough juice for that) and it does a better job, too! I suspect we will change to electric cooking over time.
We already have four air source heat pump units which go a long way to keeping us warm in winter and vice versa. Each unit gives us the equivalent of 4kw of resistive electric heating/cooling for 650 watts so even in winter the solar panels/car already do a lot of our heating. Picture: photos.app.goo.gl/wiEtCma2WvStpb2e9
We really are doing our best! :-)
Thank you for watching and your comment.
Sheila.
@@ElectrAA gosh why 4 ASHP ? We are looking at getting 1 for our house - 4 seems a lot are they air to water ?
@@leoclarke6462
Hi, Leo,
When I say four, we have four fan units in the house, one in the master bedroom, one in the living room, one in the 'office' and one in the conservatory (so we can use that as an extra room regardless of the weather). Things like this: photos.app.goo.gl/pr8GLYXGy143M4Z87
These are run by three compressor units outside the house, the two you saw in the previous picture and another at ground level on the other side of the house. You could not heat an entire house with one electric fan heater, and similarly, you need several fan units, spread around the house, to warm it all.
@@StephenBell ah ASHP air to air
I haven't ploughed through all the comments to see if the odometer reading anomaly has been resolved, but I noticed that the 5456 mile reading on the form would correspond to 8780 kilometres. It looks as if someone entered the odometer reading on the car into the system as being kilometres instead of miles.
This error in inputting the car mileage would presumably influence the quality of any conclusions arrived at regarding the "treatment" of the battery (charging) and the degradation of the battery?
Hi, Alan,
Thank you for your contribution. Please see the "- - - UPDATES - - -" in the video description above.
Thank you for watching and taking the trouble to comment.
Cheers,
Sheila.
If you use Gas for Water heating perhaps you should look into a Heat Pump Solar Hot water System. Its like a reverse Fridge and only runs a fan. I don't know what your weather is like but if cold would perhaps be best inside. It does pump out Cold A/C air when the Fan is running. I've had one for 15 years. They have an initial high price but us very little electricity so some maths involved.
Hi, Keith,
May we direct you to Leo Clarke's question of about a week ago and the conversation that followed? Just scroll down a bit.
Cheers,
Sheila and Stephen.
Very very slow roll out, i am trying to purchase a v2h charger . Impossible.
I agree that it has been slow to take off. We have visibly proven that V2G/H works brilliantly for all parties: the grid, the car, us, and the environment. Part of the problem is still a lack of a universal connector and protocol at the car end. Hopefully, this is now at least on the horizon. Nissan's 2025 Leaf will have CCS charging but a directional Type 2 socket and a bidirectional home charger as part of the purchase price.
Keep the faith, Gino, it will happen.
Thank you for watching and commenting,
Sheila.
"Hey Grandma..." said with the utmost respect. i'm with ya regarding those webinar not letting you ask questions. i bet they were over their head since you/users have more experience. lots of charts, i'm not into charts, my nuclear engineer friend is.
found this PDF file called A Closer Look at State of Charge (SOC) and State of Health (SOH) Estimation Techniques for Batteries if you google you will find it. if i add url link it won't be posted
Thank you. The link to the PDF you mentioned can be found here: is.gd/SOC_SOH . Thank you for watching and commenting.
@@ElectrAA LOL you got the link. I am a Certified Photovoltaic / Solar Thermal Technician. i approve your videos *OLE'!*
With my local power utility, the argument was brought up that homes that deliver power to the grid are only providing the "power generation" portion of what the utility does. The Utility still has to do more than just power generation. They have to transport the power, and maintain the infrastructure. For this reason, it doesn't make sense for home owners to get paid the FULL price of electric power, since they're only providing PART of what it takes to deliver power.
Of course, you are correct. Maybe we'll see some sort of annual or monthly fee that covers maintaining the infrastructure, much as BT charges for a landline (or did.)
Thank you for watching and commenting.
Sheila.
Homeowners are not just providing power generation. Home owners have invested a lot of money(loans with interest) into this, and they are helping to balance the grid, which reduces the costs for running the grid.
Also, remember solar panels, powerwalls, chargers, and evs needs service or maintenance, and they don't last forever. Sooner or later, new ones are needed.
Even though I am not into the green movement, I think homeowners are doing a good job, and they must be paid full amount.
@fix-and-drive-diy-repairs So you completely ignore the REAL costs of everything beyond just generating. Transport, security, and maintenance just exist by magic to you.
@suserman7775 you mean the cost of buying and installing solar panels, buying and installing powerwalls, buying and installing chargers, converters, transformers, and buying electric cars and the cost of servicing and maintaining all these stuff? And, the cost of replacing them when they fail or get old.
Both the grid and the homeowner have costs, and both should benefit.
@fix-and-drive-diy-repairs All the costs you mention are incurred for the power company's generation too. But the homeowner pays ZERO costs for transport and maintenance and security thereof. Different costs deserve different pay.
Only when you sell your used Leaf will you know whether you have lost or made money. Your choice on charging levels very sound. But remember all these battery cells have a declining life use, damaged by rapid large and severe discharge under load use. I look forward to your battery report in 12 years time. 👌
Hi, Brian,
You are correct of course; only time will tell what the long-term effects of V2G are. However, bear in mind, if when driving I put my foot to the floor I am burning 160 kW out of the battery. That, I would agree, can be described as "rapid large and severe discharge under load" but the V2G charger only discharges at 6 kW absolute maximum and OVO limit export to around 3.5 kW so I don't think the battery is being stressed.
Also, bear in mind, V2G does not affect Nissan's battery warranty which lasts 8 years and/or 100,000 miles. So, if after 8 years, V2G has unduly damaged the battery we can expect Nissan to replace it. We are certain V2G has kept our battery healthy during the lockdown periods.
We'll release another video in November which will mark 2 years on V2G and the official end of our 2-year trial. We'll see how our battery has fared then, but it's still looking very positive so far. After that, we hope to join in with Indra's latest plan to test out "Load Balancing". :-) tinyurl.com/V2Hgraphic
Thank you for watching and commenting.
A battery degrades even when you don't use it. The factor time is as important as charging/discharging. Good video, hope all cars support this soon with the new ISO 15118-II standard.
@@chrisminnoy3637 Hi, Chris, I can't actually find that ISO 15118-II standard with any reference to EVs. Could you provide a link, please?
Thank you for watching and commenting.
👏👏👍👍😃😃
Thank you for watching.
Sheila.
Excellent video. Thank you very much!
Thank you for watching and subscribing.