Honda is joining with the V2X Suisse consortium to demonstrate bi-directional charging technology.

The automaker will supply 50 e electric vehicles to Switzerland’s car sharing operator, Mobility. The EVs will be used as part of a car sharing fleet in a pioneering trial which uses the e’s bi-directional charging function to feed energy back to the grid when the vehicles are not in use for sharing.

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To allow bi-directional charging, the automaker is also providing 35 power manager units which will deliver V2G energy recovery capability for Mobility, at various sites across Switzerland.

The trial includes the claimed world’s first mass-deployment of the COMBO-CCS (Combined Charging System) configuration with bi-directional functionality: currently the e is the EV in Europe to allow both charging and discharging, as standard, for the European charging system CCS.

Honda Power Manager is a bi-directional system that connects EVs to a power grid, enabling the collection and distribution of electricity between the two. This allows for intelligent balancing of the supply and demand of energy, including the better use of renewable sources and supports the stabilisation of the grid.

In this project, the 50 EVs will be allocated to 40 stations across Switzerland. A single car can feed up to 20 kilowatts of power back into the grid when plugged into a bi-directional charging station. This not only regulates power to stabilise the grid during periods of high demand and minimise bottlenecks in the distribution of energy, but also reduces the need for expensive grid expansions as demand for EV charging increases.

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Using a cloud-to-cloud IT platform developed by fellow consortium member sun2wheel, the power manager units can manage the available power for each EV in 15 minute cycles to assess and regulate the flow of electricity. The scheme will enable Honda to verify the relationship between vehicle usage frequency and V2G operation, actual V2G operation time and frequency, and how this impacts on customer convenience.

Through a real-world demonstration, the automaker can conduct data collection and analysis of car sharing and V2G battery energy services, which will lead to the development of Honda’s future energy services.

Demonstration of this project will start from September 2022, and will run until the end of 2023, and includes consortium members Mobility, EVTEC, sun2wheel, tiko, Novatlantis and ETH Zurich, supported by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy.