Bidirectional charging: the electric car as a home battery
In the world of electric cars, questions often arise about advanced technologies such as two-way charging and using your electric car as a home battery. These questions relate to cost savings and sustainability, and we are here to answer them. In this article, we dive deeper into what two-way charging entails and the benefits it brings.
The future of electric cars
Two-way charging is an innovative technology that allows you to draw power from your electric car to use in and around your home or office. Instead of investing in a separate home battery, you can use some electric cars as a powerful power source for your daily needs.
Sustainable living and saving money
However, not all electric cars can feed power back to the grid. This is because the power from the car has to be converted from alternating current to direct current. This conversion can only take place using V2X technology, which stands for vehicle-to-everything.
So how does this work in practice? With two-way charging, you can use your electric car’s battery as a kind of home battery. When you connect your electric car to the charger, you can store the solar energy generated in the car’s battery. This eliminates the need to feed electricity back to the grid and can save you considerable money on your energy bill.
Smart energy use
Electric cars with a larger battery capacity in particular offer an interesting option to make a separate home battery unnecessary. In such cases, your electric car can serve as both your daily means of transport and your home energy storage solution.
Some advantages of bi-directional charging include the use of always cheap power, the possibility of storing green energy at home, dealing with the phasing out of the net-metering scheme, and preventing overloading of the grid.
Car brands that can already charge bi-directionally
Wondering which car brands currently support two-way charging? Among others, the Hyundai IONIQ 5, Kia EV6, Kia Niro EV (latest version), Volvo EX90, Volkswagen ID.3, Volkswagen ID.4 (after the right update), and Polestar 3 offer this technology.
Bidirectional charging opens the door to a new world of energy efficiency and cost savings, and it is an exciting development in the evolution of electric vehicles.
