Clean Carbon member Professor Andrew Cruden and his team are pioneering the dual use of electric vehicle energy storage. Dual use means that a vehicle provides its own core vehicle transportation duty and grid support when it is connected to the network for recharging. This concept is referred to as Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) operation. In other words, V2G encompasses the aggregated use of battery elements on all electric or plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (EVs) as a grid scale electrical energy store.
V2G technology has many technical challenges to overcome as well as requiring careful cost benefit analysis of the effect of increased charge/discharge cycling of the battery, and associated degradation, versus the grid support benefits achieved. This project is funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), and will study lithium battery cell development and degradation under Vehicle to Grid (V2G) operation and investigate grid scale energy storage, from a battery perspective upwards rather than from a network level downwards.
Our 4 key aims are to:
- Determine the anticipated patterns of battery cycling associated with driving and V2G operation for specified grid support functions e.g. frequency support and peak shaving.
- Investigate the impact of the anticipated V2G operation on battery cell, module and pack cycle life, failures and thermal behaviour (i.e. thermal cycling and impact on cold/hot battery charging behaviour). Additioally more accurate determination of battery sate of charge (SoC) and state of health (SoH) is required, including ensuring cell balance within the battery pack.
- Investigate the communication and control temporal and physical information requirements from the battery management system (BMS) to the grid control system and vice versa.
- Demonstrate V2G operation within distinct UK and Chinese environments, employing the new BMS software with cycling/thermal control, and improved SoC/SoH prediction.
Our UK academic partners are the Universities of Sheffield, Warwick, Strathclyde and Liverpool.
Our partners in China are Huazhong University of Science & Technology (HUST), Tsinghua University and the China Electric Power Research Institute (CEPRI).
Our industrial partners are Johnson Matthey Battery Systems (formerly Axeon), Yuasa Battery Europe Ltd., NCP, SSE, REAPsystems Ltd and Xuji Power Co. Ltd.
Project news stories https://www.southampton.ac.uk/v2g/news/latest.page
Links to external websites
The University cannot accept responsibility for external websites.