E-cars serve as redistribution grid for excess wind energy
The project offers a solution for a central challenge in Germany’s energy market: Due to the decentralized feed-in of renewable energies (46% in 2019), there are transport bottlenecks in the power grid. To prevent this, Tennet has to reduce the generation of renewable energy in the north of Germany and at the same time increase conventional power generation in the south at high cost – an expensive matter, especially at peak loads.
To prevent this, the wind power available in northern Germany was used by electric cars in the region. At the same time, in the south, electricity from fully charged batteries of Nissan Leaf electric vehicles was fed back into the power grid instead of cranking up fossil fuel generation. The mobility and charging requirements of vehicle users were taken into account. Thus, the use of renewable energies could be increased and a shutdown of wind power in the north with high cost or valuable energy losses could be avoided.
These intelligent redistribution measures were controlled by software from The Mobility House, the charge and energy management system ChargePilot, which is based on Tennet specifications. After analysis of the participants, the pilot project showed that electric mobility can be used in the future to flexibly control renewable power production, which is highly dependent on the weather. “This relieves the strain on the power grid and helps us to limit the expensive shutdown of wind turbines. The short-term flexibility that electromobility provides us with in this way can complement grid expansion and become an important building block of the energy turnaround,” said Tennet Managing Director Tim Meyerjürgens.
The economic potential involved is certainly worth mentioning: In 2017 and 2018, more than 5 terawatt hours of surplus wind power had to be regulated in each case (figures related to German energy market). Electric cars as intermediate storage could thus have helped to save up to 8 million tons of CO2 in these years.
An intelligent charging and energy management system such as ChargePilot is necessary so that the small-scale and decentralized capacities of electric vehicles can be efficiently incorporated into the grid management by the grid operators. The charge control of the redispatch measures was carried out locally and in real time – through the connection to the technology platform of The Mobility House and a platform of Tennet, which controls small-scale flexibility.
The Mobility House used the same technology that is already being used in a Renault-Nissan Alliance project on Porto Santo. The Island belonging to the Madeira archipelago has set itself the goal of becoming the first CO2-free island in the world. The project that has now been completed with Tennet and Nissan shows that electric cars can help stabilize the power grid and thus make a fundamental contribution to the energy turnaround. A further necessary element is the use of the CHAdeMO standard for the charging technology of the vehicle, which must be equipped for bidirectional energy exchange.
More information (in German): https://www.sinteg.de/
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