The Australian National University has been crunching some numbers and has found EV's could limit the spread of power cuts during emergency outages. Earlier this year a fleet of just sixteen EV’s charging in Canberra detected a blackout in Melbourne and were able to discharge power back into the grid.
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00:00There's in fact 51 electric vehicles in the ACT that are set up to do this and they have
00:08special chargers that are able to pull power out of the vehicles as well as the normal
00:12charging and they've been ready for years now and thankfully these sorts of emergencies
00:18only happen very infrequently and so this was the first time that since our vehicles
00:22have been prepared that we had such a major event in the national electricity system.
00:28The technology that we've been working on of vehicle to grid of discharging power from
00:33electric vehicles is fantastic.
00:36The greater emphasis now needs to be on just making sure that we don't have regular electric
00:42vehicles charging during these periods and a quick back of the envelope is that while
00:47power ended up being cut to 90,000 customers in Melbourne, the equivalent of that would
00:51have been to cut power to stop electric vehicles charging and you would only need 6,000 electric
00:57vehicles to have the same effect and so I really am advocating that we put in place
01:02the technologies, the standards and also the social expectations that once every couple
01:07of years your electric vehicle might just stop charging for half an hour because it's
01:12trying to contribute to the security of the national grid.