Global Seminar | Vehicle-to-Grid for car-sharing: Can shared EVs support the power grid in future cities?

Car-sharing services offer the opportunity to reduce the number of privately owned cars, and thereby CO2 emissions. As part of the political, economic and social shift towards emission-free mobility solutions, many car-sharing fleets are electrified. Shared electric vehicles (EVs) not only contribute towards sustainable mobility, but could bring additional benefits by providing ancillary services with so-called ‘Vehicle-to-Grid’ (V2G) innovations, i.e. charging and discharging the vehicle based on power grid needs.

In this project, we investigate the potential of V2G in (future) car-sharing systems. Based on data from a national-scale car-sharing service in Switzerland, we optimise V2G operations and analyse the resulting benefits for the fleet owner as well as the power grid operator. We further simulate scenarios for 2030 and discuss the potential for V2G under varying utilisation rates of the car-sharing service. We find that there is
a reciprocal relationship between the car-sharing owner and the grid operator, where both can profit from V2G services.

Our study calls for a greater role of car-sharing in V2G research, and for owners of shared fleets to pay more attention to V2G as a promising business model.

Presenter:

Nina Wiedemann
PhD student at Mobility Information Engineering Lab,
ETH Zurich

Future Cities Lab (FCL) Global Seminars

Ideas, discussion and thinking on sustainable cities and settlement systems at the intersection of science, design, place and time