Clean energy stored in electric vehicles to power buildings

Stored energy from electric vehicles (EVs) can be used to power large buildings — creating new possibilities for the future of smart, renewable energy — thanks to ground-breaking battery research from WMG at the University of Warwick

Stored energy from electric vehicles (EVs) can be used to power large buildings — creating new possibilities for the future of smart, renewable energy — thanks to ground-breaking battery research from WMG at the University of Warwick.

Dr Kotub Uddin, with colleagues from WMG’s Energy and Electrical Systems group and Jaguar Land Rover, has demonstrated that vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology can be intelligently utilised to take enough energy from idle EV batteries to be pumped into the grid and power buildings — without damaging the batteries.

This new research into the potentials of V2G shows that it could actually improve vehicle battery life by around ten percent over a year.

For two years, Dr Uddin’s team analysed some of the world’s most advanced lithium ion batteries used in commercially available EVs — and created one of the most accurate battery degradation models existing in the public domain — to predict battery capacity and power fade over time, under various ageing acceleration factors — including temperature, state of charge, current and depth of discharge.

Using this validated degradation model, Dr Uddin developed a ‘smart grid’ algorithm, which intelligently calculates how much energy a vehicle requires to carry out daily journeys, and — crucially — how much energy can be taken from its battery without negatively affecting it, or even improving its longevity.

The researchers used their ‘smart grid’ algorithm to see if they could power WMG’s International Digital Laboratory — a large, busy building which contains a 100-seater auditorium, two electrical laboratories, teaching laboratories, meeting rooms, and houses approximately 360 staff — with energy from EVs parked on the University of Warwick campus.

They worked out that the number of EVs parked on the campus (around 2.1% of cars, in line with the UK market share of EVs) could spare the energy to power this building — and that in doing so, capacity fade in participant EV batteries would be reduced by up to 9.1%, and power fade by up to 12.1% over a year.

It has previously been thought that extracting energy from EVs with V2G technology causes their lithium ion batteries to degrade more rapidly.
Read full article at Science Daily