AGL says it is thinking about ways your electric car can make you money

The Driven

Energy provider AGL wants you to be able to make money out of your car, while it is sitting at home in the garage.

Electric vehicles are now back on the whiteboard as part of the Coalition technology roadmap discussion paper on Thursday, but AGL’s EV strategy lead Kristian Handberg has been thinking about how electric cars will become part of everyday Australian lives for some four years now.

The impact that an increasing number of electric vehicles will have on the electricity grid is a real problem, but Handberg says it is also an opportunity.

Speaking in a webinar on Friday hosted by EV fleet management program Charge Together Fleets Evenergi and the Electric Vehicle Council, Handberg explained how amid the political maze that is electric vehicle policy, AGL is currently pushing to trial ways of managing the charging and discharging of electric vehicles using home-charging products that deliver benefits to the customer – namely, cold hard cash.

“We’re running a range of of initiatives at the moment within my portfolio of work and the first of those is at the pointy end of trying to solve the EV grid integration problem,” says Handberg.

“We’re negotiating with the Australian government for their support around a test of this orchestration – manage charging and discharging – using a range of different technologies in approaches and what we are trying to do is answer the key questions that relate to EV grid integration.

“Some of the analysis that you’ll see around speaks to the problem being felt most by the distribution networks and that is at the home charging level,” he says.

As electric vehicle uptake tends to occur in social clusters (the keeping up with the Jones’ effect), energy providers do not have visibility of the cars vehicles, which can have an adverse effect on the local grid.

“With distribution networks that is quite a hard challenge to solve,” says Handberg.

To read the full version of this story – and view the photo gallery – on RenewEconomy’s electric vehicle dedicated site, The Driven, click here…

RenewEconomy and its sister sites One Step Off The Grid and The Driven will continue to publish throughout the Covid-19 crisis, posting good news about technology and project development, and holding government, regulators and business to account. But as the conference market evaporates, and some advertisers pull in their budgets, readers can help by making a voluntary donation here to help ensure we can continue to offer the service free of charge and to as wide an audience as possible. Thankyou for your support.