I’ve been telling people about this technology for a long time – and the batteries are now getting big enough, and long lived enough, to make it a reality.
Australian study shows potential for EV owners to realize up to 12,000 Australian dollars a year (about 8000 USD) if they allow their EVs to be accessed for Frequency Control Ancillary Services (FCAS) and grid storage.
A new report from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) has found that a fleet of EVs used to supply Frequency Control Ancillary Services (FCAS) to the National Energy Market (NEM) could generate revenue of up to $12,000 per vehicle in a single year.
The staggering findings are outlined in a new report Insights from the Realising Electric Vehicle-to-Grid Services Project, that looked at the charging habits of EV drivers, the probable bidding capacity, and the potential business case for fleet operators to bid into FCAS markets using V2G.
The trial looked at some of the impediments to V2G technology and how new systems, such as operating envelopes, could help accommodate high local demands when overall network capacity allows;
It also looked at how a business case could be developed in the context of fleet operators accelerating the electrification of their fleet; and quantified the potential economic value and the user experience of V2G technology.
The most astonishing finding that the average EV could have earned around $12,000 participating in the NSW FCAS “Regulation Raise” market, based on 2022 data, and use just one per cent of the EVs total charging energy.
There are 10 FCAS markets in the NEM which help stabilise both minor and major variations in grid frequency with varying response times from 1 second 5 minutes.
Using 2022 FCAS market data and the real-world charging/plugin times of the commercial EV fleet, Energeia, the company AEMO commissioned to do the analysis, was able to calculate what the revenue from V2G FCAS would have been per vehicle.
Australian Renewable Energy Agency:
Key Findings
The key findings from this analysis were:
- The average electric vehicle could have earned ~$12,000 participating in the NSW FCAS raise regulation market or ~$2,600 in the NSW FCAS raise 60-second contingency market, based on 2022 data;
- The average electric vehicle could earn ~$9,000 from participating in the NSW FCAS lower regulation market, or ~$2,000 from participating in the NSW FCAS lower 60-second contingency market, based on 2022 data;
- Vehicles were often fully charged when FCAS were required, so charging behaviours need to be managed to ensure enough headroom to participate in the FCAS lower markets; and
- Participation in the contingency FCAS market is unlikely to have significant impact on driver experience and EV battery degradation.
The good news is that any homeowner on a participating grid who has an EV can monetize its battery capacity.
The bad (or rather, normal) news, is that the non-Haves are left out of this opportunity. They do benefit from the increased stability of the power supply, of course.
A grid running mainly on hydro or thermal – whether nuclear or fossil – doesn’t need all this rigmarole to stop the current wandering away from 50 Hertz (or 60 if American.) Lots of hundred ton turbine-generators spinning at 1800 rpm have enough inertia to keep the AC stable till more power can kick in. Wind and solar don’t have that built-in metronome, so need extra measures to keep the beat. (There may be an ersatz version at the recieving end of a high voltage direct current line, to turn the DC back to AC – a big rotor spinning, but as a net energy user.)
Yet the grid is moving away from that old model, because avoiding very inexpensive intermittent generation with very low operational costs just doesn’t make sense if it can be incorporated stably at scale, and storage and better power electronics and control systems are speeding that. A decade or two ago people would say having 20% of intermittent generation is destabilizing but nobody says that anymore as records keep breaking.
Hawaii’s already moving their large renewables sites to using grid-forming inverters, and that kind of thing is expected to grow. This month’s IEEE Power and Electric magazine is all about inverter-based resources and their guest editorial is “Toward Inverter-Based Resource-Dominated Systems: Gathering Remaining Pieces Of A Puzzle”
Preserving existing spinning reserves would be helpful even if decoupled from thermal generation like you mentioned, or coupled to newer thermal generation in place. It will be interesting to see if any of the companies trying to merge horizontal drilling/fracking with geothermal power will pan out, particularly with their promise of being able to site at things like closing thermal power plants. Interesting decades under way.
This might be just the ticket to get Australian rental property owners to install chargers and screen renters for those with EV’s, if the landlord could get these monies. One EV could pay for the whole install in the first year alone.