Polestar Is Betting on This Charging Technology

• Polestar plans to test vehicle-to-grid (V2G) charging in Sweden, in cooperation with local utilities, using Polestar 3 models.
• The EV maker is hoping fleets of EVs will be part of a power ecosystem in the future that will allow them to use their batteries to automatically store and dispense power, in connection to the grid, based on grid needs, with owners monetizing the batteries in their EVs in this manner.
• Polestar plans a similar V2G pilot project in California, in collaboration with the California Energy Commission.

Vehicle-to-grid charging has long been seen as one of the next steps in the evolution of smart homes, allowing EVs to transfer power back to the grid when it is advantageous to do so, and to charge during off-peak hours. But until recently, there haven't been enough compatible EVs with bi-directional charging to attempt such a project at scale.

Now, Polestar is undertaking a large-scale vehicle-to-grid (V2G) project in Sweden that will connect a sizable fleet of Polestar 3 SUVs, allowing them to serve as a Virtual Power Plant (VPP).

The project is aimed at allowing owners to monetize their EVs while they're parked at home, all done automatically without any management on the part of owners, with a cloud based VPP calculating the collective capacity of all the connected batteries and performing charging or discharging based on demand.

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«Vehicle-to-grid has the potential to not only benefit individual customers, but whole communities. The average car is parked 90% of the time,» said Thomas Ingenlath, Polestar CEO.

Polestar paints the process as completely free of intervention from owners. All they'll need to do is plug in their EV at home, and let the VPP manage the rest. At least in theory.

Polestar will undertake this pilot project along with Swedish National Grid authority Svenska kraftnät, regional energy distributor Vattenfall Eldistribution, Chalmers University of Technology, home charging provider Easee, and with local grid owner Göteborg Energi Nät. So quite a few partners are needed to make this work even on an experimental scale.

A similar project is planned for California, where Polestar