Engie Vehicle-To-Grid | Fully Charged

Hello and welcome to Fully Charged. Now, I'm a little bit obsessed, I admit it, about vehicle-to-grid, about what that could really mean in the future. So we've come to Amsterdam to visit a French company. A little bit confusing, but they're all over Europe. Engie is a French company. They're here and they have one of the first working, functioning vehicle-to-grid systems in Europe. So, Jacob, I've seen loads of vehicle-to-grid systems in exhibitions and in halls at motor shows. But this one is actually installed and actually is working. Is that right? This is actually working. This is not a demo. We thought it was very important to really demonstrate that it works because all the mock-ups and all the ideas we wanted to demonstrate. Also, for us, for testing, if everything is as it should be. But that's why we made this demonstration project at our own office, where this car's battery is connected to the building. Right. And is there solar on this building or is that not on this one? There is solar, but not on the building, but in the pond. Oh, in the pond. There is floating in the pond. Floating solar. Floating solar. Floating solar, which actually is also a very interesting thing with this charger. So you can directly connect the solar to this charger. So normally you do the solar connecting to the building and do the charging to the building and then it's very difficult to... To isolate the source, really. Absolutely. And also do the energy management. But if you do it via the charger, it's even more efficient because you use only one inverter. And it's cheaper because you don't have to buy another inverter for the solar panels and even for the storage. Right. Oh, so the solar is feeding into the inverter that's in here anyway. Yes. So you have some sort of a small DC microgrid. Right. Which is more efficient and cheaper. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And we like, as Dutch, we like cheap. We like cheap. We like cheap. But then, so at the moment, I mean, is it possible to tell if that is probably charged now, this car? I think this is charged and then you have a display on your app where you can say it's discharged and I think you can even see it in the car. Right. And at the moment, because this is the other thing, because we thought, oh, let's plug the I-PACE in. We can't because it's only CHAdeMO, isn't it? It's only CHAdeMO. The CHAdeMO protocol is well advanced to do bidirectional charging. Right. In my opinion, they are a little bit more ahead about the bidirectional opportunities. They are. Big time. Yeah. And that's why we work with the CHAdeMO protocol. So, for instance, we haven't, we're not actually got the LEAF with us right now, but could we plug the LEAF in? Would that do the same thing? Seamlessly. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So there's not been a software update or anything special? No, no, no. And that's the funny thing is everybody says, well, it's more like the V2G is something for pilots and only for a few cars. But even if you look at... Any car with a CHAdeMO at the moment would work. Can do this. Yeah. And there are a lot of Outlanders currently out there in the Netherlands. So everybody who drives an Outlander, who wanted to drive an Outlander, can now use the bidirectional functionalities. Yeah. The change is going to be, because at the moment, the expensive, for instance, having one in your house, which I've fantasized for a long time. Yeah, absolutely. But at the moment, they're very expensive. They're still too expensive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We are looking at business cases. If you also use the car for energy flexibility in the grid, and then it's still too expensive. Yeah, yeah. So I think the next generation will be a little bit smaller and a little bit cheaper. So we think that within five years, these, well, big chargers will be as small as normal chargers in the same price range. You can put it on your wall and you just plug your car in. Absolutely, absolutely. There's so many sort of other aspects of Vehicles to Grid that is fascinating. The one I've heard is that a lot of people are saying it actually improves battery life rather than diminishes it. I don't know if you... Yeah, that's something that we investigated. Right. And it's hard to say really improved because batteries will never improve. But it doesn't really degrade it. No, everything is about cycles. Yeah. And it's about the depth of the cycles, because every certain battery has a certain amount of cycles within the degradation of the battery. And if you drive a car, the cycles are very short. Yeah. And they have certain characteristics. And if you do Vehicles to Grid, there are deeper cycles. Right. Which for all the diversity of the cycles is really important for the battery. Otherwise, it's degrading sooner. It's a little bit technical than this, but this is the layman's terms. Basically, it's charging and discharging much slower than when you're driving it. Yes, yes, yes. So it's a much gentler use of the battery. Absolutely, absolutely. If you're looking at the energy transition, everybody is thinking about the big problem is storage. Yeah. And we within ENGIE was thinking about, well, if you look at storage and look at the new business models, because I was really inspired by, let's say, Uber, which is the biggest taxi company without owning any taxis. Yeah. Or cabs, as you say. Looking at Airbnb, which is the biggest hotel chain without owning any beds. We were thinking, well, how can we be the biggest flex provider or storage provider without owning any batteries? Right. Everybody is buying batteries, buying batteries. Why don't we don't buy batteries, but use batteries that are already there? And then if you look at the cars, 90% to 95% of the time, they are standing still. They're doing nothing, yeah, which is the big argument. So why don't we use those batteries? That's why we really invest in smart charging and also in bidirectional charge. Right, right. And then if you connect it to the building, in this case, it gives you a wide range of other options, because when there is a power blackout within this building, we can maintain, let's say, the elevators and some sort of emergency lighting for, let's say, two hours. Right. So you make a building a little bit more safe. Yeah. And on the other hand, you can do... And that's with one car. I mean, if all the cars here were electric and they were all joined to it, you could run the whole building for a few days. You can run the whole building, yeah. We did some optimising. We think that if you have a building like this, four bidirectional charges up to six will be the optimal and all the other will be normal charges. So it will always be a hybrid solution. Not all charges will be bidirectional. But the funny thing, and that could save you a lot of money, is with peak shaving. Yes. Because you see that if a building starts operating, everybody starts working and also starts charging your car. Yeah. There is a big peak. A big chunk. Right. So if on that peak you deliver power from your car, which is still some energy left in it, or not charging, you can do real peak shaving and that can save you a lot of money in the year. Because I mean, I suppose that's the business model. It's going to be... It is a good one to think of. I think Airbnb is probably a better... But that's the end goal. That's the end goal, yeah. Because if there were, you know, two million electric cars in the Netherlands and a lot of vehicle-to-grid systems installed, there's presumably then got to be financial incentives of some sort for the owners of the vehicles to use that. Because then you think, oh, it is worth me plugging into this system. And that's my opinion that eventually we now pay for charging. Yeah. And I think in the long term we will get paid to be connected. Right. Connected. Yes. Yeah. So a connection fee or something like that. And if you leave your car and it can be for the charge point operator to use the flexibility of your battery, that can earn you some money. And that's what you're doing at Engie then? That is the end goal of what you're trying to work out? Absolutely. We want to be the... We want to have a very important role in the energy transition. We say we want to be the leader in the energy transition. And we see that if you work with electric vehicles, you can do two things. You can optimize your fleet. You can decarbonize your fleet. Yeah. But also, on the other hand, if you do systems like this, you can do additive storage, which accelerates your energy transition because you... Well, yeah, flexibilize. I don't know if that's a proper word. It's a really good word. Yeah, yeah. I think we should introduce it. Yeah, thank you. The energy grid. Yeah, yeah. And that's important because that's the most... That's the thing. We don't really know how it's going to happen. There are going to be more solar. There are going to be more wind, which is more flexible. And how are we going to cope with that? Well, that's why electric vehicles also can help. Jacob then wanted me to see another energy storage system they're using at Engie. This time at an office nearby where the roof was already covered in solar PV. So we hopped in the Kona in the I-PACE and drove up the road to take a look. So, Jacob, this is a green porter cabin outside an office block. Yes. I'm not that clever, but I think I get it. Batteries inside. Batteries. Yeah. I'm assuming what this is doing is... Is it powering the office or is it connected to the office in some way? Absolutely. It's connected to the office and especially to the solar panels, which is... So there's solar on the roof of this building. Absolutely. And then, well, it was our test and we wanted to test that. We think if you look at all the raw materials in the world, lithium-ion could be very rare if you want to be... If you're really going to use it a lot. And for the energy transition, it's really important that there's a lot of storage. Yeah. So therefore, together with our waste company, Suez, we thought, well, maybe there are second life batteries, normal second life batteries, who we can replace with lithium-ion. Right. Because why use a very high performance battery to do very low performance storage? Okay. So these are lead acids? These are lead acids. Yeah. These are normal batteries we see in cars. Everybody knows them. Yeah. But these are second life. So they're basically from the waste company straight up to here. So they're not... They're probably not good enough to use in a vehicle, but they're... No, no, no. They have more or less 80% still capacity, which for us is perfect. Yeah. And when the state of charge of a certain box is below a certain level, then we just switch the box. Right. Because this is very cheap storage. Right. And therefore, it's important. And it's, I mean, the demands on it. So when you're charging it, it's sort of constant, which you presumably can regulate with that. But then when you're discharging it, it's the same thing. It's not a sudden massive demand. No, you can't do any frequency containment or frequency control. Right. So you can do high power balancing of the grid, but you can do perfect storage for buildings like this. And in terms of capacity, do you know roughly what that is? This is more or less 60 kilowatt hours. Oh my God, that's more than I thought. It's a little bit more than people think, and we can stack it up a little bit more. So you could put... You could add to it. Absolutely. The only limitations is the weight. So it's pretty heavy. Yeah. And if you want to have a real volume, you need a bigger container. A bigger container. But in a sense, it's modular. You could just keep... You know, for a bigger building, you could have... Absolutely, absolutely. And it's very cheap. Right. Because if you... So you're not buying new batteries? No, we really reuse batteries that are already in the recycling process. Right, right. But before we're recycling it eventually... Yeah. ...to raw materials, we use it for storage. And you... I mean, what sort of a time can these operate then? I mean, how long... How much can you extend their life, if you like? We think in order of one or two years. Right. Oh, I see. So it's not 10 years. No, it's not 10 years. No, one or two. What study now shows. But it possibly is higher. But we think, well, then we swap the batteries because we want to have a certain service level to our customers that they have the storage capacity. So, I mean, what is amazing to think though is that those, you know, five years ago, those batteries would literally have been busted up and recycled straight away. Absolutely, straight away. So you're actually adding a couple of years of useful production. Absolutely. And they add extra value. Right. And eventually we think that this value, if there's more value to be made from flexibility in the grid. Yeah. You can make some really money, real money. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I mean, also, because when you think... I'm thinking, oh, how many of these batteries are there? We've just been passed by probably a couple of hundred thousand of them while we've been standing here. There's a lot of them around. I mean, they're really common, aren't they? These are old batteries, for instance, that would be used in data centers. Right. Basically never used. Oh, I see. But they were there as a backup, energy backup. And after a couple of years, they're going to be recycled. But wow, why? Yeah, so these types of batteries are very high quality, but you can also use lower quality batteries. Well, the funny thing I wanted to demonstrate was that the high-tech things with these high-tech projects eventually come with very low-tech solutions. One of the problems we had was that if you look at these batteries, when they're all connected, there's a lot of power on this. So you can't switch very safely. Right. So there was the limitation of all the things we could do, but we wanted to switch, so... As in take one lock out and put a new one in. Yeah, but there's current tension on the battery pack. So eventually we come with event switches, which we use for carnivals or stuff like that, which gives us the opportunity to plug them out while they're under complete power. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was one of the things... So that's already existing technology. Absolutely, it's very low-tech. Yeah, it's a very low-tech solution, but for us, it was very high-tech for this project. So you can just... You presumably bring a forklift in to lift them out, and then you just unplug it and you plug a new one in. Absolutely. And the whole system manages to cope with that. Absolutely, yeah. So eventually, this is a container with a couple of batteries. Yeah, there's a lot of other bits. For us, it was a very important project, yeah. Well, that's all we've got time for. Really hope you enjoyed that. I think it's some really exciting stuff happening in the world of energy storage, as we're seeing. It's just emerging. It's just starting to actually make an impact. Please do subscribe to Fully Charged. Please have a look at the Patreon link beneath this video and click the little bell icon at the top right-hand side of your screen. There, yes. And as always, if you have been, thank you for watching.