Government and business consortium celebrates the end of a new electric car trial

Australia's first vehicle-to-grid (VTG) trial, based out of the ACT, reached its first important milestone this week with 51 Qasar Wallbox bidirectional vehicle chargers installed in directorate carparks around the city, their leased Nissan Leaf EVs plugged in and ready to stabilise the grid should they be needed.

In time, these EVs will be earning a cash benefit back to the ACT government of around $400 per car per year, according to the modelling conducted by ActewAGL, which was part of the consortium involved in the VTG trial.

The cashback comes through offering frequency stability for when the national electricity grid. It's a capability known as frequency control ancillary services (FCAS) and big batteries installed around the country have been participating in this lucrative market for years.

Electric cars also have big batteries and can be very suitable for a frequency stability cash income, but only if all the associated parts to the equation - the wall charger, the hardware in the car itself, and the charging plug - work in unison and are approved by Standards Australia, which signs off the national standard.

But sadly, and in particular for the hundreds of Tesla owners who have made the ACT the fastest-growing electric car market in the country, the standards and technology don't align.

The REVS (Realising Electric Vehicle-to-Grid Services) project was funded by a $2.7 million grant from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency back in June 2020 but needed a consortium of parties, including the ACT government, ActewAGL, Nissan, Evoenergy, the ANU, Jet Charge and SG Fleet, to make it happen.

ACT Sustainability Minister Shane Rattenbury said that the trial was a "challenging project with a lot of complexity" but was a "pre-requisite for scaled deployment" of VTG in the future.

Only two production electric vehicles sold in Australia - the latest version of the Nissan Leaf and the Mitsubishi Outlander - are capable of VTG. And given the painfully slow pace at which Australian standards change, it could be years before it is shifts to allow other vehicle brands to join in.

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Tim Washington, the founder of vehicle recharging specialist Jet Charge, said that electric vehicles, too, need a particular piece of approved inverter hardware installed to be VTG-compatible.

And given the small size of the Australian electric vehicle market, it will be years before major manufacturers like Tesla, Polestar, BYD, Hyundai and Kia commit to installing, certifying and backing the costly inverter technology under their new car warranties.

But Mr Washington said that the Canberra trial should be seen as good progress, even if all the steps to date have been ponderous, overburdened by bureaucracy, and expensive.

"There is still a way to go with this [VTG] but it's important to get this technical work done now, have the proof of concept in place, and have it in place for the future," he said.

"There are lots of elements to this that need to work together but the first steps are important and the ACT is to be applauded for trying to get ahead of the curve."

Jet Charge had to make sure a particular EV car charger was fully compatible to Australian standards for bidirectional charging, and there still only the one brand that can do so. But more will be coming.

"I think it's fair to say that under the previous federal [Coalition] government, getting all the requisite pieces in place to make this technology work wasn't a priority," Mr Washington said.

"Thankfully that's behind us now."

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