More car-owners are switching to electric vehicles every year, but adoption is still much slower than many might hope. Although sales of EVs nearly doubled in 2021 from the previous year, there are still millions of passenger cars on the road, each spewing out about 404 grams of carbon dioxide every mile, making the transportation sector the worst greenhouse gas emitter in the country.
There are a myriad of reasons why many fleet and car owners have been reluctant to buy EVs, and one large concern involves the convenience of charging.
One way to knock down this reticence might be to unleash the power of the EV battery as a storage device, and not just for transportation. Bidirectional charging, also known as vehicle-to-everything (V2X) charging is quickly gaining traction among battery companies and car makers alike. The idea is basically to give an EV owner the ability to make use of the power that’s stored in their EV battery for a different purpose when the car isn’t in use. That energy could go from vehicle-to-grid (V2G), vehicle-to-building (V2B), or vehicle-to-home (V2H) when needed.
David Slutzky, the founder of Fermata Energy, a V2X technology company, told The Daily Beast. Creating more uses for these types of batteries may not only help push more consumers toward adopting EVs, but also help create a larger market for these types of batteries themselves.
Here’s how bidirectional charging works. When your local utility sees high demand, or when there are a lot of customers using power (usually during heat waves, or simply during the evening hours when everyone at home uses a lot of electricity), the software operated by V2X companies like Fermata lets customers know they should plug in their EVs into a bidirectional charger to push power back onto the grid. The utility gets additional power to distribute so the grid isn’t overloaded, and this can prevent price hikes when electricity usage is high (also known as peak demand). As the need for electricity dwindles during the night and rates decrease, consumers can charge their EVs and wake up to a full battery in the morning.
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