Initiative: Bidirectional Charging is Key for the Energy System

The "Bidirectional Charging Initiative," founded in the fall of 2021, has positioned itself with a policy paper to promote the technology. The initiative is an association of companies from the automotive, energy, and charging infrastructure sectors, flanked by a parking garage company, a software specialist, and two consulting firms.

"Our goal is to anchor bidirectional charging as an important and decisive building block of the energy and mobility transition in politics and society, and then to implement it entrepreneurially," explains Marcus Fendt, Managing Director of The Mobility House.

The technology of bidirectional charging is a new, promising, and decentralized approach in which the batteries of electric vehicles can both charge and discharge. This way, they could contribute to a relevant and flexible storage capacity for the power grid, which, with the progressing energy transition, has a higher demand for flexible storage options to meet the requirements of sectors like electricity, heat, and mobility while keeping the grid stable.

"The federal government currently assumes there will be at least 15 million all-electric cars by 2030. That is an immense potential for bidirectional charging. If we utilize the capacity of these mobile storage units, it would not only be a significant contribution to the stability of power grids, but we could also further advance the energy transition and thus the decarbonization of economy and society," states Ralf Klöpfer, board member of MVV Energie AG and one of the co-initiators of the initiative.

The technology is in an advanced stage of development, adds Martin Roemheld from Volkswagen subsidiary elli, which is also participating in the initiative. But there are no regulatory frameworks to make bidirectional charging interesting for all stakeholders, criticizes Roemheld.

This gap is what the newly launched initiative, with its 17 members, aims to close and to drive the creation of suitable frameworks so that the technology becomes economically interesting for both companies and consumers. Beyond already existing positive impulses from the European and federal politics, the policy paper published today outlines concrete steps for the market introduction of bidirectional charging. The initiators include:

1. Creation of a specific, uniform legal definition as a prerequisite for technical and economic developments.
2. Launching of a special, time-limited funding program for bidirectional charging infrastructure to prevent additional lock-in effects due to the exclusive support of unidirectional charging infrastructure and quickly establish competitive conditions in the market.
3. Further development of the control of consumption devices and flexibility procurement in the distribution grid.
4. Reduction of the minimum bid size in the balancing energy market from 5MW to 1MW to reduce entry barriers for mobile storage.
5. Exemption of mobile storage from electricity side costs by equating them with stationary storage to prevent a looming double burden on electric vehicles used as storage.
6. Expansion of the communication infrastructure through targeted acceleration of smart meter rollouts by providing incentives for the voluntary installation of smart meters.
7. Increasing the economic motivation of grid operators by considering the grid-supportive flexibility use of (mobile) storage, the digitalization of grid technology, and the associated operational costs in incentive regulation.