Through participation in a new industry-wide ESO-led trial (ESO is the electricity system operator for Great Britain), via the Power Responsive programme, the smart tariff ‘Intelligent Octopus’ (from the
Octopus Energy Group) will use batteries in electric vehicles (EVs) to ‘balance our grid while they are charging’. This initiative will develop a better understanding of how these new types of energy resources can be integrated into the grid in the future and explore the potential for batteries in cars on driveways to keep the grid balanced, a crucial milestone in enabling a ‘net zero’ power system.
The technology automatically adjusts the charging schedule of the car in response to ESO requests for more or less power. Kraken, Octopus’s tech platform, will connect to Octopus customer EVs and continually manage their response depending on changing grid needs. Importantly, any updates to charging schedules ensure that customer charging targets will still be met.
The charging and discharging is seamless for customers, who simply request the time they would like their car to be charged and amount of energy required through the Octopus app. The number of EVs using ‘Intelligent Octopus’ has grown by a quarter every month in 2023 and Octopus now has more than 100,000 drivers across its EV specific tariffs.
Alex Schoch, Octopus Energy Group’s head of flexibility, said: “EV drivers on our ‘Intelligent Octopus’ tariff now form the UK’s biggest virtual battery — and for the first time ever EVs have entered the Balancing Mechanism. While we sleep, EV drivers are driving down grid-balancing costs — costs that are passed on to all customers, so saving us all money. This is the ‘smart energy grid’ today — complete radicalisation of the way the system is balanced is here now.”
Claire Dykta, National Grid ESO’s head of markets, said: “Opening up access to the Balancing Mechanism for electric vehicles and other technologies is an important step for extending consumer flexibility in a ‘net zero’ world. This industry-wide trial will provide valuable information to our control room, to help enable the full-time availability of electric vehicles in the Balancing Mechanism in future.”