Today, the Dutch current-affairs programme EenVandaag covered something V2G Liberty has been doing for years: using your electric car not just to drive, but also as a battery — to earn money and to relieve the overloaded power grid. Thijs de Back, a V2G Liberty user from the very start, got to share his experiences. A great moment, because the topic is finally breaking out of its niche.
Why this matters now
The power grid is hitting its limits. At the same time, cars sit idle most of the day — each one a battery doing nothing. By letting those cars feed power back during peak moments, electricity doesn’t have to travel far and the grid is relieved locally. And now that the net-metering scheme ends on 1 January, it’s becoming more financially attractive for households too to store the power they generate themselves and use or sell it at the right moment.
The broadcast made it clear that there are now two worlds. There are ready-made systems from carmakers that significantly lower the barrier — and it’s great that they exist. And there’s the open, self-assembled route that V2G Liberty users have been driving for three years with a Nissan Leaf.
The flip side of ready-made
The easy packages come with a cost you won’t see on the invoice: dependence. You’re locked into one type of charger, often one car brand, and one mandatory energy contract. There’s already a standard “language” for bidirectional charging, but cars and chargers still each speak their own “dialect”, which is why a car often works with only one type of charger. Carmakers opt for closed systems because of this confusion of tongues, but also to recoup their initial investments — and that leaves the consumer sitting in the gilded cage.
That’s exactly what V2G Liberty was created for. It’s open source, it controls your charger based on the electricity price per quarter-hour, and the whole point is that you stay independent: from your energy supplier, and eventually from the brand of your car and charger too. You stay in control.
Let’s be honest
We’re not going to pretend V2G Liberty is a breeze for everyone. Right now it still requires a precise combination of equipment that’s also hard to get hold of — but that’s changing. More chargers and cars are arriving that can talk to each other, and that means you can get a fair price for your electricity.
And that’s exactly where the invitation lies. The more people join in, the faster we can get support for new chargers and cars, and the stronger the alternative to the locked-down packages becomes.
Want to join?
V2G Liberty is free and open source. Do you have a bidirectional setup, are you technically savvy, or do you simply want to help build an open energy future? Join us, contribute, or add your charger.