The interdisciplinary research project aims at developing and testing an intelligent and bidirectional charging management system including associated components for electric vehicles. The developed products and services will be analysed in a field test with 50 BMW i3s equipped with bidirectional charging technology. The electric vehicles will be integrated into the energy system in an advantageous way from both a system’s and an actor's point of view.

The project requires a wide range of innovations in the areas of vehicle technology, charging hardware, charging management and communication interfaces to different stakeholders. Therefore, the project partners develop bidirectional systems for vehicles and wallboxes as well as technologies for energy management systems, hardware and software for controlled charging as well as digital services. The developed solutions will be tested in different use cases for bidirectional charging management, in which the vehicle batteries are used as mobile energy storages that are able to feed back into the power grid. Thereby, the electric vehicles can be charged by renewable energies or provide grid services. In addition, the project partners will examine legal and regulatory framework conditions and investigate the acceptance and user-friendliness of the developed solutions in the field.

The core task of this project is to integrate the flexibility and battery capacity of electric vehicles into the energy system in a smart way from both a system’s and an actor's point of view. Therefore, KIT investigates the interaction of bidirectional charging management with electricity markets and grids and the potential for providing economic and green charging energy. To this end, existing energy system models will be extended to include electromobility with bidirectional functionality. The effects of Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) on the European electricity market will be analyzed using the agent-based electricity market simulation model PowerACE. In addition, the potential of V2G for improved integration of renewable energies will be investigated based on a grid model. In order to identify the opportunities and risks for bidirectional charging management also from the user perspective, KIT is also involved in user acceptance research and thus supports the holistic research approach of the project.