Sixty electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles owned by customers and KEPCO will be outfitted with EV switches, which are control instruments for electric vehicle charging developed by KEPCO and Sumitomo Electric.

Nissan, KEPCO and Sumitomo Electric will link their servers to enable remote-control charging, collect vehicle information and identify available charging capacity.

The test is the first of its kind in Japan and is part of the Kansai VPP Project, a demonstration of virtual power plants—systems that integrate many types of power sources to create a reliable and flexible power supply. The purpose is to build up technical expertise and collect and analyze data to evaluate the use of electric vehicles as power sources.