David Van (Victoria, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Electric vehicles are well known and are lauded for environmental benefits, helping to reduce emissions and reliance on fossil fuels. Yet the true value of electric vehicles extends far beyond their lack of fumes. Their potential to revolutionise our energy system and to drive down emissions in our electrical system is immense. Using what's known as V2G, vehicle to grid or vehicle to home—or vehicle to everything, V2X, as it's sometimes called—enables an electric vehicle to go from being a car to being a battery on wheels. For example, take into account charging an electric car at work during the middle of the day, when the sun's shining like it is today and energy is cheap, and then driving it home and plugging it into your house so that your household can take advantage of that energy. Or, if you sign up to a plan, then AEMO can use that energy to balance out the grid at the time when the grid needs the energy most.

This time-phase shift is the primary benefit of V2G or V2X technology because it allows you to bridge the time from the middle of the day, when, as I said, energy is cheap and in excess, to later in the day and early evening, when there is peak demand. This capability transforms EVs into mobile storage units which can discharge electricity back into the grid or into the home. An average-sized EV battery can store more than enough energy to power a household. Picture this: in the middle of a scorching summer day, as the demand for electricity peaks, thousands of EVs are being driven home and parked in their garage and are discharging part of their energy into the house, alleviating the strain on our grid and ensuring that everyone can keep their lights and air conditioners on. When an EV is combined with a photovoltaic system—rooftop solar—a highly efficient home microgrid is created.

AEMO's recent 2024 Integrated System Plan indicates that by 2035 we're going to need 522 gigawatt hours of storage of this kind, rising to 660 gigawatt hours by 2050. If you look at the average consumption of a four-person household, which is about 20 kilowatt hours, then you can see that there are a lot of households that are going to need a lot of batteries, either in the form of a standalone battery in the house or, alternatively, as an EV plugged into their house.

The average battery capacity of an electric vehicle is around 72 kilowatt hours, more than enough to power a household during the peak times. When considering factors such as power conversion loss and battery health, a four-person household could be powered for over two days by an EV, and obviously topped up during the middle of the day.

Projections by CSIRO using the AEMO step change scenario indicate that the national electricity market could, as I said, require up to 522 gigawatt hours by 2035 and 660 gigawatt hours by 2050. Currently there are about 80,000 battery electric vehicles on Australian roads. Encouraging the adoption of one million EVs equipped with V2G technology by 2030 could contribute up to 65 gigawatts of stored energy capacity. When scaled up, given the potential of EVs with V2X to provide substantial energy storage and reduce peak demand, the necessity of expensive projects like Rewiring the Nation all of a sudden become very questionable. Why not reward households for making sustainable choices and encourage them to buy a V2G enabled vehicle?