Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), working with the Schatz Energy Research Center, is testing vehicle-to-microgrid technology at the Redwood Coast Airport to demonstrate how bidirectional electric vehicles (EV) in a microgrid can integrate solar and boost resilience.
The project is a collaboration between Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), Schatz Energy Research Center and Nuvve, formerly a vehicle-to-grid company that recently purchased Fermata Energy.
“A big takeaway from this project is that we successfully demonstrated bidirectional power flow control with frequency,” said David Carter, principal engineer at Schatz Energy Research Center, which is located on the campus of Cal Poly Humboldt. “We can basically put the microgrid into an absorb mode if there’s an abundance of energy, or we can put it into a conserve mode if there’s not enough energy–without relying on network connections to distributed energy resources.”
In addition to controlling EV operation with frequency, the airport project focuses on dispatching energy from the EVs when it makes the most economic sense, said Hamza Lemsaddek, COO at Fermata Energy. When the microgrid is grid-tied, the platform looks at energy costs and revenue opportunities, with a goal of extracting the most value from the EVs.
While bidirectional EV deployment has slowed somewhat in response to the Trump administration’s phase-out of EV tax credits, certain states continue to focus on the advantages of these mobile microgrids, said Greg Poilasne, CEO of Nuvve. They include California, New York, Illinois and Maryland.
