OVO V2G Group - current thoughts?

​@Sam72 It does need the right incentive to get people to invest. However, I challenge anybody to tell me what the right tariff would be if you have solar, a heat pump, a battery, an EV, V2G and actually have it work reliably. Even then there are obstacles like someone is saying that Charge Anytimes stops them from preconditioning the car. We seem to have created a technological Gordian Knot for ourselves.

​@Peter E that would be tricky! My only point is, Ovo introduced the V2G, a group of us trialled it. It just seems odd to me that Ovo decided which V2G to go with and then subsequently introduces Charge Anytime and does not incorporate the V2G users - it’s an Indra machine, so difficult to understand why it wasn’t included by design into the compatibility group. I think there should be tariffs to encourage solar, battery and V2G, as broader rollouts of these technologies have the potential to ease grid demand.

It wouldn’t be the first time that OVO have chosen a product and then decided it wasn’t compatible later on. In my early EV days in 2021, after a lot of research, I decided to go with the EO Pro charge point and by the time I ordered the installation OVO said it wasn’t compatible any more. Now, to be honest, it saved me a lot of grief later on as the EO Pro was about the worst possible charge point you could have had. I won’t go into the details. In the end I built my own dumb 3.5kW CP (I’m on a looped supply) and went to Agile Octopus with the car’s timers to control everything. It’s simple, cheap and relaible.

I never did think V2G was viable from the beginning on the basis that the battery in cars is about £6k and it wouldn’t take a lot of degradation from the V2G use to make the whole thing uneconomic. I’d have to admit I can’t say if there would have been any significant degradation but it seemed too much of a risk to even contemplate doing that for any car. For the record my Zoe ZE40 can’t anyway. When car batteries are cheaper, when the V2G is a similar price to a normal CP, when there are no issues with compatibility, tariffs, integration and relaibilty then maybe, on a large scale, it may work.

Peter

​@Peter E , for what it’s worth, I’ve been doing V2G for over three years now and have not seen any noticeable degradation in battery life.

That's good feedback. I've not heard that from anybody else but probably because so few people have done that. Useful information. Thank you.

Morning ​@Sam72 and ​@Peter E,

There’s some really interesting points made around battery degradation so thank you for the insight and feedback 😊

There has been quite a lot of discussion regarding battery degradation with vehicle batteries and V2G. Lithium Ion cells degrade in various ways. There is calendar age where you lose capacity over time rather than usage. There is usage degradation where the total energy charge/discharged causes degradation. There is the time that the cells are kept at maximum voltage at high temperatures which is related to calendar ageing. There is the rate of charge/discharge where high rates can cause additional degradation.

I would say that all of these, individually is quite small but the sum of these together tends to cause a degradation of somewhere between 1-2% per year for wet Lion cells. LFP cells have a lower rate of degradation but have a lower energy density.

With V2G charge/discharge rates are somewhat lower than that when driving so it could well be expected that the V2G use of a car's batteries doesn't significantly reduce the life of the battery.

The V2G concept is more economical using car batteries as they used to cost about £150/kWh and are now cheaper whereas companies are still charging £4-500/kWh for house batteries for a whole system installed. There was a whole thing about V2G solving the problem of peak power production and high costs associated with that about 2/3 years ago but it has all but vanished recently and I think the issue is that it rarely works in practice.

Peter

Thanks for sharing ​@Peter E!

I know me personally I don’t have room in this house to install a battery system but an external V2G setup could work for me. If you use a battery within the correct parameters you can normally get a great life span from it. I think I need to do some more reading this eve on the current state of V2G in 2025 😃

I thought the V2G was restricted to Chademo connecters but Wallbox now do the Quasar 2 which is for CCS connectors and with the right tariff you could have an EV and do some neat import/export with differential rates to make it pay. It just needs the right lifestyle to allow that to happen. Just be sure to run a realistic cost model before buying as they are £6k + fitting and find out what your DNO and your connection will allow you to import/export.

I've done a simulation for a home battery and because we are careful with what we use in the peak (all that restraint that  OVO taught us for Power Move rewards) we can only save about £80 a year (for a retired couple) at best so not enough to do that.

We were on the original V2G indra trial.  It was great during lockdown, as the car was sat there all day!  Not so much after that, and we finally gave the indra box away a year ago, replacing it with a home battery system.  Gave as there’s little 2nd hand value to them, as indra don’t connect anything they haven’t installed.  This was partly as we anticipated selling the leaf, and partly because we wanted more PV, which is easy to integrate into a home battery system.  Why not have both?  It’s simpler to keep under the 8kW max export that we’re allowed (4 from fit, additional 4 from g99).  If we kept the v2g unit it would be way more complex.  Mrs robl is happy, as that chademo connector kept sticking, or the unit sometimes didn’t work quite right.

We didn’t see more than average car battery degradation after 3 years of use - I understand that’s largely because the leaf has poor software, and left to its own devices on a granny charger/similar it will just charge up to full and sit there, the worst possible thing to do.  In contrast the V2G unit rarely pushes the battery out of its 20-80% comfort zone.  
I’m hoping car integrated AC chargers to be bidirectional one day, that will really cause an uptake in v2g.  I’m not sure if it will happen; as time goes on, home batts get cheaper and cheaper, £1800 for 15kWh now on fogstar (UK).