CEE (alongside partners Northern Powergrid, the Energy Systems Catapult and the UK Energy Innovation Centre) are delighted to have been awarded £500,000 from OFGEM’s Strategic Innovation Fund to develop our Power Wheels Project through its next phase.
Power Wheels recognises the potential of Motability’s electric vehicle (EV) fleet to provide the largest Virtual Power Plant (VPP) in the UK and provide life-saving resilience benefits to disabled customers. By expanding the useability of the 100,000 Electric Vehicle Motability leases to disabled customers into a VPP it could provide over 10 GWh of flexible power to the grid, and generate electricity bill savings for participating customers. However, the technology to deliver VPPs from EVs is not well developed – Power Wheels aims to change that.
Additionally, disabled customers are particularly vulnerable to power cuts, as many of them rely on electrically powered medical equipment or heating. Currently, diesel generators are used to provide back-up power, but these are expensive, take time to deploy and cause pollution. Power Wheels aims to develop a system where back up power can instead be used from electricity stored in their EV Battery, thus creating a cheaper, greener and more seamless solution. Whilst this is currently not possible, this project will develop and test solutions.
Power Wheels puts disabled consumers at the heart of the energy transition, providing them with energy savings and life-saving resilience benefits whilst turning EVs into an accessible national asset to enhance system reliability, affordability, and decarbonisation.
The 6 month project officially kicked off in February- watch this space for further updates!
Do you have a project that our skills and solutions could help support? Find our contact details below to start the conversation
Allison Strachan,
Senior Energy Systems Specialist