Aussie electric vehicle (EV) owners have just scored a major win and could be making money when their car is sitting at home. The Australian government revealed that Standards Australia has officially approved a new standard for vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology.
V2G allows you to funnel electricity from your EV battery back into the grid and you could be paid big-time for it. EV expert Toby Hagon told Yahoo Finance this could be a major “game-changer” for the industry.
“Most cars are parked for 23 hours a day… and there’s a huge amount of energy being stored in those electric vehicles,” he explained.
“Your average EV could power a house for many days.”
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He described V2G as “free money” if you’re able to charge the EV from solar energy because you would just be harnessing the power of the sun to top up the car before feeding it back into the grid.
“So being able to feed that energy back in when the grid is demanding more electricity, and then recharge the car, either during the day from solar or during off-peak times, such as midnight to 6am, there are potentially huge implications with vehicle to grid.”
The EV expert said every car will be different and the amount that you’re able to feed into the grid will depend on a variety of components.
He explained that if you’re able to, for example, plunge 30 kilowatt hours a day into the grid, you could earn upwards of $5 per day.
“The potential is there to earn more than $1,000 a year off feeding electricity back in,” he told Yahoo Finance.
“But, you know, there’s a lot of a lot of factors at play there. It’s not going to happen for everyone.”
He said it will depend on how much you use your EV, which will determine how much you can feed back into the grid, as well as the buy-back schemes that energy companies will come up with to pay for your EV juice.
There is a way to make much more money than that, but it will require you to have several cars and an understanding of how the energy system works.
The energy market operator uses what’s called Frequency Control Ancillary Services (FCAS) to ensure the grid is working perfectly.
