Porsche Demonstrates Taycan Vehicle-To-Grid Capability

Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) will become an increasingly used term as EVs become more common in the future and as their charging will put an increased strain on the electrical grid. Porsche demonstrated the Taycan’s ability to provide power to the grid and essentially act as a buffer to reduce the effects of fluctuations.

The manufacturer teamed up with TransnetBW, the local electricity operator and hooked up five standard, unmodified Taycans through Porsche Home Energy Managers (HEMs). All it took, according to Porsche, were some software tweaks and the Taycan can put power back into the grid.

Gallery: Porsche Taycan V2G

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Lutz Meschke, Deputy Chairman of the Executive Board of Porsche AG, explained why the automaker was interested in this tech

The charging technology of the Porsche Taycan and our Home Energy Manager and Mobile Charger products have a lot of potential for the future: the pilot test proved that. And the balancing power market isn’t the only thing a pooling system of this kind can be used for.

Advanced solutions for green charging and other vehicle-to-grid applications are also conceivable. And that’s not all: if electric vehicles feed electrical energy back into the grid in the future for example with a private photovoltaic system, contributing to the expansion of regenerative energy, it will further increase the acceptance of e-mobility.

Porsche’s HEMs communicate with the grid via a cloud-based pooling system developed by Intelligent Energy System Services. It works as a real time interface between the vehicles and the grid, and it basically coordinates the charging according to the grid operator’s standards.

Porsche Home Energy Manager (HEM)

This experiment is also seen as a milestone by TransnetBW whose CFO Rainer Pflaum concluded that

The project team has managed to implement the complex communication infrastructure between our control system and several electric vehicles. At the same time, the strict specifications for storing and supplying balancing power have been met. This will enable us to integrate electromobility into the intelligent power grid of the future.

Porsche is, of course, not the only manufacturer that is investing in V2G. Hyundai, for instance, already offers this feature in the new Ioniq 5 EV, while Nissan, Ford and GM have also announced trials and plans to offer it in the future.