Experts have said that one of the ways to speed up EV adoption is for them to support bidirectional charging. The ability for owners to power their house off their car or from the grid is vital. Just nine EVs on the market currently support bidirectional charging, but now VW has announced that its electric ID models will support the technology.
The company says that “bidirectional charging will transform electric cars into rolling energy storage units in the future.” It’ll come with some caveats though, the first of which is that only ID models equipped with the larger 82-kWh battery packs can do it. (The entry-level ID 4 uses a 62-kWh battery pack.) The tech also requires VW’s latest update called Software 3.5. If both of those are equipped, owners will be good to go.
VW says that with the high-capacity storage that its batteries have, they can even back up solar panels on cloudy days. In the future, Volkswagen’s EVs will be able to support the grid as needed.
In addition, with clever electricity tariffs and algorithms, it is already possible today to charge the car precisely when there is a lot of renewable energy available. For example, wind turbines do not have to be switched off because there are no consumers. The electric cars can feed electricity that they do not need into the customer’s home grid (vehicle-to-home) and in future also provide power to stabilize the electricity grid.
For now this announcement only applies to Europe, where EV owners in places like Sweden are already enjoying the benefits of bidirectional charging. We have reached out to VW to see whether or not this tech will be coming to the US, and we’ll update this post when they respond.