A white paper published last week investigates the commercial viability of residential vehicle-to-grid chargers as part of Project Sciurus, and the readiness and importance of the technology in a net zero future.

Greg Payne, Senior Technical Specialist at Cenex, said: “The energy and transport industries are no-longer slow-moving sectors, with disruptive innovations such as V2G breaking the existing models and systems on an increasingly regular basis.

“As part of Project Sciurus we wanted to share how far the industry has come, what we’ve found so far and what we think the future might hold in this white paper”.

Register your place on the upcoming webinar, ‘Learnings from the world’s largest domestic V2G trial’, on Thursday 25^th March 10am-12pm

When the project started back in 2018, there were only a handful of V2G chargers in the UK and only one domestically installed unit, however now, in Sciurus alone, there are 325 V2G units in real homes across the UK.

In that time, the cost of a V2G unit, including installation, has decreased from around £15,000 to around £5,000.

During the project, participants were paid 30p per kWh of energy exported from the property, and have, on average, been paid £80 per month in V2G credits, which has resulted in approximately £30 a month net energy bill savings, or £360 per year.

Vehicle-to-Grid technology will also reduce the peak demand on the electricity network in the national switch to electric vehicles, requiring just 26% of chargepoints upgrading to V2G for the net EV charging demand at the peak to be negative.

Read more: Commercial Viability of V2G: Project Sciurus White Paper

Jessica Tan, Managing Director of OVO Smart Home, said: “OVO Energy’s V2G trial is the world’s first and largest residential programme, enabling drivers to charge their EV at cheaper times, when there’s a high amount of renewables on the grid, and sell surplus energy back to the electricity grid – meaning they could drive for free”.

Alice Goodman at Kaluza said: “Kaluza is proud to be optimising these V2Gs via its cloud platform, enabling customers to earn hundreds of pounds a year and providing valuable flexibility for the distributed and decarbonised energy system of the future.”

Project Sciurus is a research project designed to develop and deploy Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) charging technology in the UK; it aims to validate the technical and commercial potential for a domestic Vehicle-to-Grid charging solution capable of providing flexibility services to electricity networks. At the time of the project, this is the largest V2G demonstration project in the world.