Fuuse and our partners are honoured to be receiving nearly £200K in grant funding to develop new technology, called V2X, that enables electric vehicles to give energy back to the National Grid or specified locations to aid the rising pressures on energy demand.
What is V2X?
End-to-end V2X (vehicle-to-everything) allows EV chargers to enable an uptake of energy within an electric vehicle to help assist in combatting the rising energy demand in areas around the UK. Essentially, V2X is enabling your electric vehicles to be utilised as batteries that can charge, store, and return energy when needed based on energy forecasting and your organisation's priorities and trends. We hope to work toward removing the perception that cars will always simply drain fuel supplies to power themselves, and, instead, put theory into practice that EVs can be more and do more as a mobile battery.
“As momentum for EV uptake accelerates and more pressure mounts on fleets to make the transition, we must focus our efforts on resilience, for not only organisation sites, but the wider Grid. We must enable fleets to transition as responsibly and efficiently as possible.
This project is another step toward organisations becoming self sufficient when it comes to their site energy infrastructure. Fleets who can harness and redistribute their EV battery energy where it is most needed will not only reap operational and financial rewards but become a key player to providing the support the UK will need in its EV rollout goals.”
Dr WIll Maden, CEO of Fuuse
The expert consortium
Fuuse partners TPS (Turbo Power Systems) are providing essential hardware to enable maximum efficiency of the solution; whilst fleet electrification specialists, Gridicity join the consortium to produce smart intelligent forecasting of energy demand and supply. The Fuuse software will collate these insights and determine where to distribute the energy most efficiently within an organisation and the grid. Powering the crucial testbed of this project, is PNDC (Power Network Distribution centre) based at the University of Strathclyde.
‘With the challenges presented by the electricity distribution network capacity to deploying widescale electric vehicle fleets, V2X will undoubtably play a role in addressing this and unlocking the full potential of EVs.
Deployed in our Velox chargers, V2X will provide resilient and flexible charging solutions for our customers enabling transfer of power not just to the vehicle but from the vehicle to supply local premises, the grid, battery storage and even other vehicles.’
Nigel Jakeman, Engineering & Business Development Director at TPS
An ideal solution for fleets
For businesses with fleets of electric vehicles charging each night, being allowed the control to store and distribute the energy you pay for is a game changer. We are hoping to provide businesses and organisations the potential to manage where the energy is stored, how you would like to use it and where within your organisation based on your priorities, and even be given the opportunity to return excess power to the grid instead to help reduce energy waste. The cost savings for organisations with fleets could be significant.
“Knowing when EV charging demand and other building demand is expected allows for intelligent microgrid-like capabilities on the sites of fleet customers for the day ahead. The V2X solution we are working on as a consortium will be of benefit to customer sites, making the most of energy tariffs, local energy generation and offering grid services. We are pooling expertise to operationalise the potential of V2X technology.”
Alicia Blatiak, CEO and Co-Founder of Gridicity
Getting started
This project, part of the V2X Innovation Programme, is funded by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), delivered by Innovate-UK. V2X is part of the up to £65m Flexibility Innovation Programme, funded from the £1 billion DESNZ Net Zero Innovation Portfolio.
This phase of the project aims to test the concept in a controlled environment. Future developments will include real world testing with forward thinking fleets.
"V2X technologies hold great potential to provide value to their owners and to the wider energy networks. The ‘V2X Local Network Fleet Solution’ solution represents an exciting development of V2X technology that unlocks the full storage potential of EV batteries and delivers benefits from DC-to-DC power exchange efficiencies with other local energy resources. The PNDC is delighted to be able to support this by project by testing the full integrated solution within our smart grid test lab."
Ryan Sims, Lead R&D Engineer from PNDC
Check back with Fuuse for the latest updates on how this exciting new project is progressing and how you can be a part of this revolutionary change in energy solutions.
