V2G backs up Australia’s grid during extreme weather emergency

During a major storm event that eventually cut power to tens of thousands of homes, a fleet of EVs was able to feed power back into Australia’s electricity grid via a V2G system, according to research from The Australian National University (ANU).

According to Dr Bjorn Sturmberg, lead author of the study ‘Vehicle-to-grid response to a frequency contingency in a national grid – successes and shortcomings’, it’s the first time in the world this type of vehicle-to-grid (V2G) response to an emergency has been demonstrated.

Sturmberg, a senior research fellow, said in a release that “it shows electric vehicles can provide the backup we need in an emergency like this.

“We have a fleet of 51 EVs across Canberra that monitor the grid whenever they’re plugged in and can quickly inject short bursts of power to rebalance the system if the national grid rapidly loses power. They’re essentially big batteries on wheels.”

The EV trial took place during an event in February, caused by storms in Victoria.

According to a release from the Victoria government, the storm damaged 12,000km of powerlines and poles across the state’s electricity distribution businesses, resulting in outages that impacted over 500,000 homes and businesses.

For Sturmberg, the event marked “the first real-world test of our vehicles and chargers. We now know a vehicle-to-grid system can work.”

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At the time, 16 EVs were plugged into chargers at six properties across Canberra, about 500km from the location of the downed transmission lines.

All 16 vehicles discharged at their constrained maximum of 5kW within 60 seconds of the frequency trigger and remained at this power level for 10 minutes, as specified by the Australian National Electricity Market rules for contingency frequency services.

“These vehicles quickly stopped charging and within seconds started discharging power into the grid, as they’ve been programmed to do,” Sturmberg said.

“In total, they provided 107KW of support to the national grid. To put that in perspective, 105,000 vehicles responding in this way would fully cover the backup required for the whole of the ACT and NSW.

“For context, there were just under 100,000 EVs sold in Australia last year.”

According to the report, the results demonstrate the success of V2G in providing a high quantity of high-speed, high-quality frequency response services to the power system, doing so from assets that were otherwise idle, or making the power supply-demand balance worse by charging.

Shortcomings

However, the data also reveal shortcomings of current V2G implementation, as well as the market-driven approach to frequency control that they are designed for.

This can be seen in the chargers’ behaviour immediately after the ten minutes of required discharging, when nine chargers began to charge at their maximum power of 6.3kW.

“Additionally, in the case of the February emergency, once the vehicles had provided power for ten minutes some resumed charging by default. There would be little cost or inconvenience in delaying charging for an hour or two in this kind of situation,” said Sturmberg.

Sturmberg added that there is still work to be done to balance the growing demand for vehicle charging with grid security.

“It may call for an industry adjustment, for instance, to require EV manufacturers to programme their vehicles to stop charging during a grid emergency, with an option for drivers to override for urgent charging.

“Stopping just 6,000 EVs charging would have kept the power on for those 90,000 customers whose power was cut on February 13.

“Our results show that vehicle to grid can be a powerful contributor to our power system’s security, and that all electric vehicles have an important role to play.”

The research report, led by Sturmberg and available on Research Square, is a preprint and has not yet been peer-reviewed by a journal.