‘Vehicle to everything’
The municipality of Rotterdam, together with BMW, has conducted a trial in which they use fully electric cars to reduce the peak load on the power grid. In addition, two BMW’s i3 at the ‘right times’ gave up the filling of their battery. The municipality looks back positively on the trial.
The ‘V2x-pilot’, where V2x stands for ‘vehicle to everything’, used two BMW i3s to return energy stored in the car battery to the power grid. In this case, the two i3s were used at Kleinpolderplein, the main fleet location of the municipality of Rotterdam. When heavier equipment – ​​such as electric garbage trucks – was being charged, the i3s supplied power to the site’s energy grid. In this way, the maximum power demand from the energy network was reduced. When the energy demand of the entire site was lower, the i3s, which were used for personnel transport, were able to recharge their batteries.
The two electric cars were assisted in this system by a ‘super battery’, which consists of the batteries of another ten BMW’s i3. The municipality of Rotterdam, together with BMW and TotalEnergies, calculated that a fleet of 66 i3s would be good for a 14 percent reduction in the peak load on the power grid. Supplemented with a super battery, this percentage rises to 23 percent.
By 2030, the entire fleet of the municipality of Rotterdam must be electric, which means that the demand for electricity will increase sharply in the coming years. Scaling up the infrastructure to meet this demand requires significant investment. These investments can partly be made unnecessary if the ‘discharging’ of electric cars is applied on a larger scale, the pilot shows. As a result, the investments can be applied elsewhere in the energy grid and the total demand for scaled-up charging grid infrastructure is reduced. In light of the already major challenges with regard to the energy transition, this is good news, according to the municipality of Rotterdam.
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– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl