Overview
Through the use of renewable energy sources, electricity is produced irregularly and consumed more irregularly, for example through the fast charging of electric cars or the use of heat pumps.
In order to have as much energy as desired available at any time, massive investments would have to be made in the expansion of the electricity grid. For example, by building new power plants.
Alternatively, the available energy can be increased in the short term by either switching off large consumers or feeding electricity into the grid. This is known as capacity reserve. A grid with sufficient capacity reserve can balance load peaks without the need for grid expansion.
Today, capacity reserve is mainly supplied by electricity supply companies that use generators to feed energy into the grid at short notice. Another participant in the capacity reserve market are so-called aggregators. Aggregators are companies that have access to a large number of similar electricity-generating devices. So-called bundles. These bundles can be switched off at the same time to balance out peak loads in the electricity grid. Typical devices for such bundles at the moment are boilers or heat pumps. When the grid operator announces the need for capacity reserve, an aggregator can switch off 5000 heat pumps within seconds, for example, and thus relieve the electricity grid.
This project is researching whether electric cars would be suitable in principle to form bundles and feed energy from the car batteries into the grid within seconds when needed. This approach is called "Vehicle to Grid - V2G". At the same time, it is being investigated whether a "Vehicle to Grid" business model can be economically interesting.
The aim of the project is to evaluate a communication standard that allows the aggregator to communicate with the operator of a charging station network, the charging station itself and the vehicle within seconds of the demand being requested by the network operator.
It must be possible to send the request through the entire chain in a fraction of a second, so that the capacity reserve is in the network within seconds. In addition, the data must be absolutely secure against access from the outside and privacy takes a high priority.
