Can EVs help get more out of the grid, for less? Two new grant winners hope to show the way

Electric vehicles could be a stabilising force for the grid, if their owners let them, which is why two charging companies are among the recipients of a new federal grant for supporting tech. 

Jet Charge is running one of 14 projects that on Wednesday were awarded between $250,000 and $5 million a piece under the Albanese government’s new Grid Enhancing Technologies grant program.

The Jet Charge project is exploring how to wring network benefits from vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology, following a two year Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) study that ended late last year. 

This time the focus is on using electric vehicles (EVs) as batteries on wheels to power homes and support the grid during periods of peak demand. 

Charge Hub Australia is the other EV company on the list and is looking into how dynamic pricing can change when people charge their EVs.

The grant program is coming out of the Rewiring the Nation kitty, with a total funding pool worth $30 million.

With transmission projects mired in construction and planning costs and detail, and distribution monopolies restricted in what they can add to regulated asset bases, privately-owned tech companies offer a third way towards unblocking grids.

“We want to use our sovereign renewables to strengthen our grid and shield Australians from global energy shocks,” federal energy minister Chris Bowen said in a statement. 

 “The Grid Enhancing Technologies grants will support more renewables in the system, put downward pressure on energy bills, and build a stronger, more resilient grid.”

The other grant winners include tech that helps large-scale renewable energy developers quickly find sites with the best connection options, cross-network battery coordination software, and a project to let apartment residents share solar and battery power. 

The grant is aiming to speed up the development of technologies that get more out of existing network infrastructure, and ultimately bring down power bills and avoid building new poles and wires. All projects have to be completed by April 2029.

Gridscout cofounder Joel Bulow was over the moon to discover his company was among the recipients, and says the $360,000 in cash will allow it to hire more data and software engineers to push its grid bottleneck spotting software into the next stage. 

“Part of the funding was also around grid education, so we will be running seminars across Australia to teach industry about grid performance and how it works,” he told Renew Economy.

“We’ll be hiring people to add further advanced grid analysis features to help people make better site selection and project operation decisions around grid constraints.”

The successful projects are:

• – Ecojoule Energy: Accelerating grid efficiency for consumers through network optimisation
  – AusNet Electricity Services: Network exchanger
  – Energenze: Asia Pacific regional electrification accelerated by dynamic resource coordination
  – Jet Charge: Realising networks benefits from vehicle-to-grid (V2G)
  – Ouroborous: FlexBat: A battery orchestration platform for grid support
  – Essential Energy: Unlocking grid capacity through enhanced thermal management of transformers
  – Zeppelin Bend: Self service grid connection toolkit
  – Karit (Australia): Smart export control using a vpp to reduce curtailment and costs
  – BES (Australia): Unlocking the latent network capacity via soft open point and dynamic limit
  – GridScout: A platform for visualising network constraints and outages
  – Allume Energy: Shared solar & battery optimisation for multi-unit dwellings
  – Charge Hub Australia: From anxiety to access: designing dynamic pricing that customers will want
  – Metrolo: Network & market co-optimisation planning tool for grid enhancing assets
  – Epec Engineering: Enhancing grid stability: Oscillation localisation and visualisation

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