It's Now Legal To Use Your CAR To Power Your HOUSE! Australia's First Bi-Directional EV Charger
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- Опубліковано 6 лип 2024
- Exclusive! Deep-dive into the first bi-directional EV charger installation on a residential or commercial property in Australia. Pricing, tech specs, battery warranty implications - and a couple of surprising limitations.
Joseph Evans from Ballycroft Wines in South Australia's Barossa Valley is an Australian V2G (vehicle-to-grid) trailblazer. He spent three years pursuing electricity network operator permission to get a Wallbox Quasar bi-directional charger installed to use with his Nissan Leaf EV and 33 kW solar power system.
In this video:
00:00 - Introduction
00:20 - 3 things you'll need for V2G
00:58 - Joseph's long road to V2G
01:47 - EV and charger technical specs
02:34 - V2G vs. V2H and limitations
03:29 - Using the Leaf's battery at night
04:47 - Battery degradation and warrany
05:35 - Load performance
06:09 - How much it all cost
07:00 - The bi-directional charger in action
07:56 - The Wallbox Quasar and blackouts
08:21 - Wrapping up
Learn everything you need to know about electric vehicles, EV charging and integration with home solar power:
www.solarquotes.com.au/electr...
And to receive quotes from top-notch EV charger installers I have personally pre-vetted and trust: www.solarquotes.com.au/quote/
If you have questions after watching the video, feel free to ask in the comments section below - and don't forget to subscribe to this channel :). - Наука та технологія
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Phenomenal - so happy to see this happening in SA!
Now, if only our recalcitrant utility provider in NSW would be open to such a (now proven to work) system…
The problem is that the CEC (Clean Energy Council) is dragging its feet on certifying V2G chargers. The party line from most DNSPs and supplies is no end-user installations without CEC certification, as without that they have to handle any liability, so NSW is not alone.
SAPN however, apparently with the support of the SA government, has taken this on and majorly p!ssed off the CEC in the process. Note however that I understand it still has to be offically a "pilot" installation - let's see how SAPN interprets this in practice.
Wow shows us what is coming. Thanks for making this and big thanks Joe.
This not only needs taking up, it needs major incentives. Labor's local community battery talk is very good, but helping this to get up, helps people power their home, as well as add stability to the grid. It will need to be taken up more widely than one winery in SA.
So good to see SQ on the ball with new technologies arriving in Aus! I have a 6.6kW solar system. Ive been wanting to buy a model3 EV however my research shows it is not V2G ready yet! I'm thinking of installing a home battery but much prefer a vehicle with V2G ... It does get complicated and learning about my kWh usage does my head in. Battery ayback doesn't make quite much sense yet compared to solar panels. I am going to hold my cash for now and keep up date.
Thanks for your work to move us forward
Nevermind the V2G. Look at that epic BYD stack! Must've cost a fortune.
System has been on trial in the UK the last three years (search powerloop). Although the Quasar is limited to 6amps charge or discharge via the app, if you use the Web interface, the limit is + or - 3amps and you can go lower via modbus, though it gets unstable below about 2amps. Here (UK), my electricity supplier has control of the Quasar via OCPP, and they incentivise both charge and discharge, so if they schedule it to discharge during peak demand, they pay 3x the regular export rate and when they schedule it to charge they bill at the off peak rate about 1/3 of regular import rate. They always maintain a minimum charge in the car, and you specify what charge level and at what time you want the car available in the morning. Need to have a 'smart' meter with half hour billing.
Always the catch.
Brilliant video and thanks for sharing more of this in the field. Super interested to see how this plays with a house battery in the eco-system. Would imagine is a pretty common use case for those going down this path (Solar + Batt + EV + V2H charger)
Good overview Joseph, thanks. One friendly comment: please understand the difference between kW (power) and kWh (energy). Fortunately there were corrections added as captions during the interview, but they shouldn’t be necessary.
With the V2G in place why bother with a battery stack (in addition to the EV's battery) so long as the whole system is set up to isolate in the case of a grid outage?L
@@HarmLessSolutionsNZ Agree if you didnt already have a battery the business case would be killed by the EV storage.
Thanks for the great detail in operation - never knew there was a minimum discharge rate. This is the reason I'm still hanging on to my old LEAF.
Planning to get an LFP battery upgrade from EVs Enhanced (when they finally release it) and hopefully by that time the Quasar may have come down slightly in price.
I think this might work much better if you have a home battery as well as the LEAF - this way you can drive it when you need to, and I'm presuming you can discharge the LEAF while your home battery is charging and the LEAF will be able to supply all that the home battery requires to top-up.
Yes there will be some efficiency losses going from EV to battery but it'll still be more than the measly FiT you're likely to get. This way you get to use every single kW generated by your panels for yourself and not sell it to the grid for a pittance.
Or the other idea is to charge your other EVs with the LEAF using the V2G. Your LEAF can stay at home during the day and get charged on solar, and can still be used as a second runabout car.when required. Then it can be used to charge the primary car when it gets home at the end of the day.
Yes, it opens up all sorts of interesting scenarios, particularly hybrid installations with home batteries. This is just the start.
sad ev enhanced still hasn't released anything. I want to do exactly the same
@@martiruda Sadly Wallbox has discontinued their support for Chademo so this is less and less likely to happen now
Great video. Would love a rundown on the rest of the system, i see the BYD battery stack in the background.
Joseph got the BYD/Fronius Gen24 system for backup as the wallbox quasar can’t do that.
@@SolarQuotes Why not just put an islanding set-up into place to isolate the Quasar/micro grid in the case of a grid outage?
@@HarmLessSolutionsNZ Have you got a wiring diagram? How will the Qasar throttle the solar when there is no grid, and the car can't take all the power?
@@SolarQuotes Maybe I'm oversimplifying the system as I'm regarding the EV as just another form of storage and the bi-di charger as a type of hybrid charger.
That being my logic the excess solar generation during blackout must also apply for any storage battery system. How is the situation dealt with by them? Dump the excess power or disable the PV inverter?
It’s an inspiring story - I bought a Nissan Leaf last year in the hope of using V2G and am on the waiting list with Jet Charge. I’ve just discovered the new Wallbox Quasar 2 has a CCS EV connection - any news if the CHADeMO equipped Quasar will continue in production?
Great story … the feed in tarrif is very small tho .. I get 51cents per kw from solar in Qld.. interesting thought to have v2h and it will do marvels to you battery as it smooths and balances your cells depending on settings … steep price for wall box …btw larger Leaf is 62kw battery
$10k + install is an outrageous cost. Hopefully, this comes down massively as the technology becomes popular. How long is the warranty for this?
It would take a very long time for the average user to get to break even
I do not know about Australia but the main focus should be to completely avoid any costs and taxes that comes from the government and distributor. I bet houses in Australia can be completely off grid. We all should focus to cut off the middle man ;)
10k for the v2g charger. Cannot do below 1.2kw. Basically still need a battery separately if you want it to operate normally. Talk about gouging early adapters. Cannot even work in an outage situation. Clearly has ways to go before it's remotely user friendly.
Hi Joseph - great video many thanks.
Just one question, what is the pile of boxes up the wall behind you, with the dark grey box at the tip with wiring going into that one box?
Thanks - Have a great Christmas and all the best wishes for the new year.
It is a 22 kWh, 8kW hybrid solar system using BYD batteries and a Fronius Gen 24. Joseph uses it for backup if the power goes off during a vintage to save his wine from ruin.
@@SolarQuotes - OK, to be specific, in the event of an outage they can run off grid from the battery but not from the car?
@@malcolmstreet1 correct, wallbox will power off
A home battery with passthrough technology would solve the need to get approval for v2g? The passthrough technology is already available in UPS. It would also solve the increased home battery cycle count too.
I've read that a few Tesla 3 have been modified to take part in V2G trials in EU.
Yes, I've been communicating online with someone looking at hooking up just such an arrangement with the CHAdeMO connector talking directly to the battery.
3 years to get power network to agree. Ridiculous
Fair point - but now the first has been approved - should be very quick to get subsequent ones - in SA at least!
@@SolarQuotes Ok so here we are 12 months on! SNAILS pace!
Total no-brainer. Go - go - go.
That 1.2kW minimum is a killer. The whole point for me would be powering my house if the grid goes down, and thus you wouldn’t be feeding excess power back to the grid (I assume with a transfer/islanding switch). So I guess I’d have to run a electric heater the entire time just to make sure I don’t go below the minimum?
I might be wrong but I thought he said you couldn't even power your home if the grid was down with that model, so double killer
Any surplus from the 1.2kW will go to the grid (unless you are off grid!)
@@SolarQuotes yeah, 100% of my interest in these products is in emergency power for my house, hope they get that figured out.
This is common with PV systems, called IIRC anti-islanding. I believe its a safety measure to stop sparkies reconnecting grids after outages suddenly connecting to an "island" (say one house) that has full voltage. There are fail-over switches to handle this situation which I assume could work with V2G at the inverter.
@@malcolmstreet1 I'm extremely familiar with islanding... they should be engineering these to form their own microgrid and communicate with a transfer switch to make sure it's disconnected the public grid.
Been waiting for this have 17.76kw of panels. Looking a using a mitsubishi eclipse cross phev as a mobile battery.
Can still run the car in shit weather. There is a big difference in solar generation because of weather effects.
Interesting story Finn. So assuming your Leaf charged free from solar and sent 25kW to the home/grid on average 5 days / week, that's a saving of about $2k/year in electricity costs. Payback of 5-6 years for the charger. And the car itself could save $5k / year in fuel costs compared to a petrol car. The costs for EV v. petrol car over a 5 year timeframe is starting look atttactive?
If Joseph is offsetting 25kWh of grid electricity per day, every day, with his battery, he's saving (usage-tarrif minus feed-in-tariff) - so that would be about $2,500 per year. If exporting the energy, his earnings would depend on his feed-in-tariff, which may be fixed or variable depending on his electricity retailer.
Can I charge my Solar batteries from my electric car via the generator port in my inverter? ( assuming a Nissan leaf)
In theory - yes. in practice it depends on your hardware and how its wired up
Interesting concept. I wonder why the wall box is that much more though? Technically it’s just an EVSE, a gateway device, so it should be cheaper than full fledged inverters that has the heavy duty task of converting AC to DC (and vice versa). I would think the price should be marginally more than regular EVSE like Zappi, no?
Great question. I have no idea why it's so expensive. I'll ask the manufacturer and let you know what they say...
This is not an EVSE. It is a bidirectional inverter. The connection from the Wallbox is DC, not AC. This is why it's using the ChaDeMo connector and not the Type 1 plug on the Leaf.
@@luckyal_syd agreed - it needs to invert DC to AC, but still crazy expensive.
@@SolarQuotes - classic first to market situation = high R&D expenses to amortise with an initial small market. Hopefully we just wait for demand to increase = higher production = economies of scale = lower price and get into a virtuous cycle.
Although at worst it may not break out of that for a while - home batteries seem to be only just starting after several years of staying in a small market/high cost niche.
Still a couple of years off. This needs to have seamless integration. Plug it in and the smarts work it all out. Very much still in its infancy. For 10k he would have been better off adding more BYD batteries and leaving the car alone for driving purposes. I would assume it only feeds back to one phase? Personally I think a home battery makes much more sense, which he already has.
So how is the car charged? Where is the power coming from that is feeding back into the grid or the house? Charge up at a free charging station and send back into the grid? Missing part of the puzzel here
Pretty sure he mentioned 30kW of solar on his roof, so presumably he could charge his car in a few hours
If you switch of the connection to the grid, your pv inverter can be used to supply around 2kw power for modest home power consumption. No need for the wallbox quasar, at a cost of $10,000. An absolute rip-off, as there is nothing more needed essentially than the high voltage connection to the inverter, which doesn’t cost much at all, perhaps $AU1500 or so plus installation. A great business opportunity, but people jumping on and ripping off customers will kill the industry, along with the overpriced ev’s as well. People should get wise soon, and accelerate the change to low-cost renewable energy.
about time that this technology was implimented; this will be the game changer to achieve minimum 100% renewables
What's the loss of the V2G bi-directional charger, 10% ? If one needs to use the EV to commute to work say Monday to Friday, one doesn't want to discharge the EV car's battery to run the house at night hence the cost really justified?
In my case I have a 62 kWh Leaf. He's using 20kWh overnight. Starting from 80% that would leave me with c. 47%, enough for c. 150km. So not a problem unless I was planning a long trip.
However I'm retired so only commute a couple of days per week, so I can recharge from my PV array during the day.
If you were commuting daily the way I'd arrange it is to supply the house and possibly grid with power from the car over the evening peak, then when that's over recharge from the grid at off-peak rates.
Encourage people to use public transport,
I am speculating that Tesla has not started doing V2G in their vehicles, as it may kill their home battery production.
V2G is a bad idea for hour long storage or longer. If we go down the wind/ solar+ batteries route ( with no base load) we will need something like tonne and a half of batteries per person if we use current best lithium tech in order to back up the grid( in UK that is..Austrailia willl be a bit different havent done the calcs?). If you are middle class, wealthy and propped up by subsidy it might seem OK for you individually but just because you can afford it individually doesn't mean it's a good idea environmentally. And even if a tonne and a half of batteries were available for each of us without the gigantic environmental impact you wouldn't put them in your vehicles trundling around the road network. Ok you're ev will have a little bit of extra capacity that you don't use but the objective of good vehicle design is to bring the excess capacity down to the minimum required to fulfill the function ( transport).
Ps short term fluctuation of charge rate for frequency control might be worth doing yes ...that's solving a much smaller problem...v2g will not solve the big problem of hour - week long grid backup. Or more precisely it maybe could do it if we create a market to encourage it but it would require that the whole population ( or maybe just the wealthy bit) own an EV with massively outsized batteries. The unnecessarily large levels of battery manufacture will require gigantic amounts of energy and entail very significant damage to the environment mining the scarce materials required.
But people are already doing that, buying tesla’s wich has at least 450km reach. I think most people will use maybe max 20% for a ride to work.
I heard that from 70k km the environmental impact of the battery will be less than an ICE car. So even if you have an oversized battery it’s easily more sustainable than ICE’s even without considering air polution
Hi we had a trial period of this system about 12 months ago in the UK. and I was accepted as a trial customer. It meant I had to change my electric company supplier to one that they told me to, they supplied all the set up, and at the end of the test period of 12 months I had the option to keep the set up for about £250. I thought it was a good deal but they kept changing the start date so I backed out of the deal before it cost me money to exit mid contract. When the test period ended about 8/9 months ago there were several charger units for sale on E-bay so a few people did not keep the unit they just bought them just to sell on. I never did see any reports on the tests so I don't know any results...
If you are draining 20 kw from your battery each night but only for 3 hours and only using 3 kw max per hour where is rest going.
I wonder how they work with the Tesla home battery when the grid is down?? Even though this model doesn't work when the grid is down.. surely it could still work if it's backed up by the Tesla battery..?? Maybe that's too simplistic looking at it...
Yes it can work with the Powerwall but V2G will be disabled if the grid goes down. Powerwall will stay running.
@@SolarQuotes - interesting. What's the situation with their PV array, is it disabled too?
@@malcolmstreet1 The PV goes through the Fronius Gen24 so it should work just fine (but I didn't specifically ask Joseph - sorry!)
@@SolarQuotes - so the difference is that the Quasar is sending out AC?
@@malcolmstreet1 Qasar either #1 takes AC in (from the Fronius solar inverter if enough solar - or grid) and puts DC out to the car battery, or #2 takes DC from the car battery and sends AC to the house/grid.
Ok, so this is good for load shedding and spreading load from and too different times of the day
What a huge disappointment! The new Quasar 2 only comes with a CCS plug so tough luck using it with a Nissan. The huge advantage to bi directional charging is to trick your solar panels into working when the grid is down and charge the car during the day and have the car power the house during the night. So solar + car and you could run off grid during an emergency.
I tend to agree with Musk. For all practical purposes, How can the car be used as a reliable supply of power to the house at critical times of hi tariff peak load (3pm to 9pm), when most peoples cars are out and about at work or doing other things at that time? You'd have to have a 9 to 3 job and never go out.... Just MO
There are a lot of people that can charge at work (in the netherlands). Peak is not at 3pm because there is still a lot solar power then. Peak starts just before diner time (5pm till 9pm), so when you come home you plug it in and start discharging. You discharge it the whole night but leave enough kW in to go to work the next day. At work you charge it again and repeat👍
I think Musk really will change his opinion on this.
1. 95% percent of the time your ev is parked.
2. Its really important to stabilize the grid when we are going to use more and more solar/wind energy.
3. Batteries cost a lot of energy/material to use and easily outlives the car itself so why not use it even more. There are tesla’s with 300k km that need maintenance on the structure that’s holding all the batteries but the batteries itself still have 85/90 percent capacity.
4. Home batteries are still expensive. Powerwall 13.5 kwh costs you just as much as this whole v2g charger setup. So if a tesla would be v2g compatible you could have a 95 kwh battery for the same price of 13.5kwh. I think thats the main reason for musk to resist this v2g movement. He still has a lot of powerwalls in stock😂
I hope the price drops so that this takes off and forces Tesla to offer similar.
The game now is how 2 get the money 2 spent for this project
*champing at the bit.
So if the car runs your house overnight to save money, how do you charge the car to use it? Find a free charger?
obviously, you set it up to have enough charge left to get to where you need to go in the morning - you don't need a full battery most days. If you don't need to travel in the morning that 30 kW solar system will whack energy back into the car quickly after sunrise.
I think this thinking is flawed. Sometimes life gets in the way and you’ll need the extra range in a day. Not often but rarely this option would leave you stranded. This will be an interesting space to watch.
Solar
So, after 3 years of planning and effectively $12,000 you get a unit that doesn't power your house when the grid is down. Sorry but there is no way I would be recommending this. I'd be looking for a better looking install too, those conduits make my head hurt
I agree. As someone who's had 5 grid outages this year, lack of off-grid capability is a deal-breaker. And yes, the flexible conduit's not a good look...
In Australia we never have outage or very rare. He based in South Australia 🇦🇺
@@michaelanich6476 🤣Must be good to live in a magical fairy land like that. Shame about the major outage across SA only last week.. Outages are a fact of life and we all must deal with them.
@bruce.. what caused the major outage and how long was it for??
Installation job does not look ideal. Hope other people can get it quicker then 3 years..
Now the first one is approved in SA other SA installs will be quicker. Rest of Australia who knows!
@@SolarQuotes it couldn't have been much quicker because the Quasar got Australian electrical safety approval only c. February this year and hence only from then could be imported.
Hopefully rollouts in SA will increase pressure on the CEC to stop dragging their feet and issue an approval for V2G chargers.
@@malcolmstreet1 Electric scooters are legal in Queensland from like 2015 or so, yet, all other states begging the question.. ask your MPs...
$10k v2g charger???
Makes more sense to get a Tesla powerwall house battery, and a standard 36amp EV charger for the car.
V2G charger needs to be cheaper for people to adopt.
Problem is cost and complexity. I was going to get panels installed on my roof. Nothing special. No battery. Just panels. But the complexity of the whole process was mind blowingly unintuative and no one could explain sufficiently clearly the steps... permits, rebate, feed in issues, system size, what would fit etc., so I didn't bother and likely never will.
I know a website that can help with that… 😊
Yikes. It's not that complex. I did it in 2009 and haven't had an electricity bill since. A little research and just pull the trigger. You won't regret it.
It's as complex as you want it to be.
Adopting bleeding edge technology is expensive 🤦♂️
Tesla I think will come out with a much better v2g charger. Tesla said there cars can do v2g with a over the air software update.
AFAIK Tesla's never said that. There was a claim a couple of years back that the on-board charger on Model 3s had bidirectional hardware, but that was quickly debunked. The person who'd made the original claim saw the same IC packages on both charge and discharge sides and assumed they were all transistors. In fact while they used the same physical packages on one side they were actually diodes, ie unidirectional. Here's a video about it:
ua-cam.com/video/lXokJEzXwaI/v-deo.html&feature=emb_logo
20million vehicles in Australia.
If EVs with big long drive 100kwh batteries that is 2,000 GWh available daily.
The majority of vehicles are parked 23hrs a day.
If the home robotic vacuum cleaner can teach the selfparking EV to connect to the grid, then 2,000 GWh of dispatchable power is available daily.
Today's maximum dispatchable fossil fueled powered generation is 600Gwh.
If you are lucky. Avg is 400Gwh.
Just saying, and with the 20million buildings with a little rooftop solar PV system and all connected to the existng national grid 660Gwh daily generation would be available.
Rapid chargers are a distracting conversation.
All EVs will be full daily.
Horse and cart thinking is dangerous.
Hmm, don't get it, what is it doing that is special??
Using car battery to store electricity
Gee boys that electrical install looks pretty shit
I dont see why you would need permission from your local grid operator to install this. With 20 solarpanels i can already send more than 7 kW solar power into the grid. It looks more like the goverments dont like the idea of less energy tax money coming in.
Ummm... Because the grid isn't designed to have power feed back like that. Not all the local substation equipment can handle backwards operation, which means if a bunch of people try to feed 5+kW into the grid, the local voltages could rise to unacceptable levels.
Don't ask me how I know... Practical experience is all I'll say.
@@tin2001 what i’m saying is i can already do that with solar energy without a battery. If i would use a home battery or an ev i would reduce the peak so why would i need some sort of permit for it. I dont need one for solar panels.
Governments should encourage adoption
Absolutely pointless. The bidirectional charger isn't worth it . I have Telsla powerwall for not much more tu han that and 3 phase power sending up to 15 kw to the grid or charging my car at 7 kw. Rubbishly expensive.