Excerpt below from an article by Alissa Walker, originally published on Curbed, August 19, 2022.

Nissan Leafs charging in Revel’s Red Hook garage could also serve as battery storage for the city’s grid. Photo: Revel Transit

Sweltering summer days put tremendous pressure on New York City’s web of substations and transmission lines, where a failure can quickly devolve from small inconvenience to major catastrophe. A partial solution may soon be sitting in the city’s parking structures. Electric cars, charged during off-hours, can feed their juice back into the grid when it’s really needed. It would take some infrastructural modifications to make it happen, but treating the city’s garaged cars as a bank of batteries, may, in the future, really make a difference right when demand peaks around dinnertime, as people come home from work, run dishwashers, do laundry, and crank up the AC.

This week, the EV ridesharing company Revel took the first small steps toward this future by installing three bidirectional chargers in its Red Hook hub. It’s the first place in the city to deploy vehicle-to-grid, or V2G, technology, meaning cars charged here can both slurp up power and dump it back out. This flexibility not only increases capacity; it also could eventually eliminate the customary move of firing up a coal-powered plant for backup, which is why Revel received program funding from Con Edison. “These distributed resources can someday work to replace peaker plants that sit on standby all year long,” says David Arfin, CEO and co-founder of NineDot Energy, the project’s clean-energy developer. “They’re expensive to maintain and operate just for those few times they’re needed on a summer weekday.”

Revel’s rideshare Teslas aren’t capable of V2G charging (yet), so for the time being the company is using Nissan Leafs to test the concept. Arfin’s team will be watching how well the hardware and software, by a company called Fermata Energy, can monitor the flow of watts to make sure efficiency is maximized, then tracking it from the other end to see how effectively Con Edison can put the power to work. The idea is that eventually more of Revel’s chargers, including those in its public-charging hubs, could be swapped out for bidirectional ones, transforming its vehicles into a roving microgrid. The possibilities really become exciting when imagining how the technology could work at scale — like using all of Amazon’s delivery vans for grid storage or harnessing the battery power of New York’s massive municipal fleet.

Read the full article on Curbed

About Fermata Energy

Fermata Energy’s proprietary vehicle-to-everything (V2X) software and bidirectional hardware technology turns EVs into energy-storage assets, and makes it possible for EVs to combat climate change, increase energy resilience, and reduce energy costs. For more information, visit www.fermataenergy.com, and follow us on Twitter (@FermataEnergy), LinkedIn, and Facebook.