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NETWORK / 8 / OCTOBER 2018 Q. What work has Innovate UK been doing in the area of electric vehi- cles and how do you see this devel- oping? A. Innovate UK has been active in the area of low carbon vehicles since 2007. We have so far funded 430 unique organisations, with more than 300 projects supported. I work specifically in EV charging and in - tegration with the power system, and in less than two years we have invested £70 million in V2G and EV charging technologies, with the support of our funders BEIS and OLEV. The automotive team at Innovate UK is also involved in fostering development ac - tivities on EV batteries, through the Faraday Battery Challenge. Finally, even funding programmes (like IDP), while not restricted to EV activities, are taking a strong focus on electrification. As announced by the PM at the recent Zero Emission Vehicles summit, the Govern - ment intends to put the UK at the forefront of low carbon vehicle technology develop- ment, and is backing this intention with substantial innovation funding. EVs represent a fast growing market, both in terms of R&D activities and mass market: just the fact that the demand is currently above the supply is indication enough that this is the right time to invest in EV technologies and it won't be long before EVs are in the mass market. Q. What is the most exciting pos- sibility for vehicle-to-grid (V2G)? What projects have you been work- ing on in this area? A. The possibilities are endless. EVs can act as distributed energy storage devices. Being mobile, geographically widespread and active mostly in the distribution network, they could help improve local electrical grids by providing flexibility services, black- The future of V2G The government is investing £30 million in vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology with 21 projects chosen to receive funding. So what are the possibilities, barriers and challenges around the adoption of V2G? Innovate UK's Dr Marco Landi, innovation lead – vehicle-to-grid and EV charging, speaks to Network editor Alec Peachey. UK, which is a reasonable size to evaluate market access and impact. Q. What is the biggest barrier for V2G in the UK and how can this be overcome? A. From a technical point of view, V2G fea- sibility has been repeatedly proven. What needs to be analysed more in depth are the 'non-technical' sides of V2G: definition of suitable business cases, and commercial proposition to customers. These are critical for V2G deployment: sources of revenues, and how these are distributed across the value chain, need to be defined. Battery degradation is ožen mentioned as a technical constraint, but I do not believe it to be such: it needs to be studied and assessed, however if V2G operation is handled correctly, battery degradation is start and outage support, power quality compensation. More than that, essentially V2G-enabled EVs rely on connection with an aggregator, and require data exchange (to monitor and manage operation): this communication and monitoring framework can be reused to provide information on the status of the local grid, effectively 'mapping' distribution network and providing DNOs with a kind of visibility they don't currently have when smart meters are not in place. The Innovate UK V2G programme includes 21 projects, ranging from business case studies to hardware/sožware (HW/ SW) development and, naturally, real-world demonstrator. It is effectively the biggest, most diverse portfolio of V2G projects in the world, and has effectively put the UK in the lead in this field. There will be more than 2,700 V2G charge points in test in the The Nissan Leaf has a maximum battery power output of 110KW. INDUSTRY INTERVIEW