The cost of charging an EV at home is about to get a lot cheaper, in theory. Renault is pioneering a service that promises to cut electricity bills in half.
Meanwhile, UK energy provider Octopus is now offering a new tariff with the hook that customers can essentially charge their electric car at home for free.
How is this possible? The EV technology enabling the savings is called bi-directional charging, and it will be rolled out at scale for the first time with the new Renault 5
The retro-futuristic supermini will become the first car to both offer the tech and allow users to access it – including in the UK from next year.
Bi-directional charging allows electricity not just into your car's battery but out again through the same cable. Which means that, if you agree, the grid can extract energy back from your car when it's needed at peak times.
Peak-time electricity is worth a lot more than off-peak electricity, so you will be storing cheap energy in your car and selling it back later at a higher rate.
“Depending on what statistic you read, a car is parked 90-95% of its total lifetime,“ Alex Schoch, global director of flexibility for Octopus, told Autocar. “In a combustion-engine world, the car is really just a single-purpose asset. But now with EVs, you have a possible secondary use case.”
Octopus has just launched its Power Pack tariff, which it says will save an EV customer driving 10,000 miles annually around £800, thanks to bi-directional charging.
“Essentially you charge for free. If you plug in for six hours per day, we say all your charging costs are covered by us,” said Schoch.
Customers can of course opt out on days when they need maximum range by alerting the relevant app.
Octopus has around 130,000 customers on its EV-angled Go tariff, which offers very cheap energy off-peak to incentivise charging but penalises energy use at peak times with surge pricing.
The company’s Kraken technology platform figures out charging optimisation and energy market needs and then juggles the demands.
The pieces missing for Octopus as it rolls out Power Pack on top of Go are on the automotive side, both with car and charger technology.
This is where Renault and its mobility arm Mobilize reckon they can win customers. Mobilize has assembled what it believes is the full package to make bi-directional work.
It has teamed up with Germany energy provider The Mobility House to offer energy tariffs tailored to bi-directional charging. It has partnered with American charging tech company Iotecha to build the Mobilize Powerbox wall charger. And it has whipped up the software to control it with France’s Software République. And then of course it supplies the cars, starting with the 5 and all subsequent Renault Group EVs.
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