Volkswagen's Making Big Promises About Electric Vehicles and the Energy Grid

Volkswagen Group’s transition toward electric vehicles has been no secret. Since getting busted with software designed to defeat emissions testing five years ago, the manufacturer has trumpeted the merits of electrification at every opportunity. Still, some continue to wonder how an EV-dominant world will work, expressing concerns that peak charging hours could stress national energy grids past the breaking point.

One proposed solution is to use the connectivity available in modern cars to take power from the grid only when surplus energy is available, while feeding electricity back into it during peak draw hours. Michael Jost, VW’s head of product strategy, said this was something the automaker has been working on.

According to Reuters, Volkswagen wants to lean into bilateral charging to use vehicle batteries as a secondary storage space. Basically, you would charge your car during the day (when solar energy is available) and share excess power back into the grid in the evenings (when demand is highest and renewable energy isn’t).

“By 2025 we will have 350 gigawatt hours worth of energy storage at our disposal through our electric car fleet. Between 2025 and 2030 this will grow to 1 terawatt hours worth of storage,” Jost explained. “That’s more energy than is currently generated by all the hydroelectric power stations in the world. We can guarantee that energy will be used and stored and this will be a new area of business.”

Reuters noted that Germany’s E.ON has been working with Japanese carmaker Nissan to develop “so-called vehicle-to-grid (V2G) services,” as well. In fact, Nissan already allows owners to share energy via the Leaf, though customers are required to own a home-charging system that allows for this. Tesla also has its Powerwall/Powerpack systems that manage the best time to take and share energy, however, neither pull any electrons from the car’s battery.

Volkswagen could sell this as an option or simply charge a fee for the service, sharing any energy savings generated with the customer. Still, it’s not clear how the program will actually work. Jost never indicated that VW’s charging stations would be equipped for bilateral charging (though that would make sense), just that future automobiles would support it. Like so many updates on the industry’s latest technology, it’s a little vague for our tastes.

Last week, Jost was busy talking up a new software-based vehicle operating system intended to launch with the Euro-market ID.3 electric car later this year. The OS is supposed to continuously work with an array of on-board sensors to amass data the company can learn from to promote safety — supposedly ending all accidents by 2050. While this automatically gets our dander up about customer data privacy, it’s also woefully incomplete in concept. Automakers rarely explain how this stuff is supposed to work but are keen to suggest the end justifies the means. This is all being done in the service of safety or to help companies metamorphose into their perfect form — why and how are irrelevant. It just needs to be done swiftly, surrounded by buzz phrases.

“How quickly can data and algorithms improve? Our customers should benefit from deep learning every week, and every day. We are moving from being a device company to being a software company,” Jost said about the operating system.

The V2G battery system seems a little more grounded, with obvious practical applications. But we’ll need a clearer battle plan from VW before we start taking it completely seriously — even if there is a solid business case to be made. Too much of this tech talk is front-loaded, jumping straight from the initial concept to profit (à la the Underpants Gnomes from South Park). It would be nice to spend a little time with step two before deciding what value it actually possesses.

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