Honda is partnering with the V2X Suisse consortium to demonstrate the role of electric vehicles (EVs) and bi-directional charging technology in the future of energy management. Honda will supply 50 Honda e electric vehicles (earlier post) to Switzerland’s car-sharing operator, Mobility. The Honda e units will be used as part of a car-sharing fleet in a trial which uses the Honda e’s bi-directional charging function to feed energy back to the grid when the vehicles are not in use for sharing.

To allow bi-directional charging, Honda is also providing 35 Honda Power Manager units. (Earlier post.) These will deliver vehicle-to-grid (V2G) energy recovery capability at various urban and suburban sites across Switzerland.

Honda Power Manager and Honda e

The V2X Suisse trial includes the first mass-deployment of the COMBO-CCS (Combined Charging System) configuration with bi-directional functionality. Currently Honda e is the only electric vehicle in the European market to allow both charging and discharging, as standard, for the European charging system CCS, making the Honda e the perfect vehicle to join the fleet.

Honda Power Manager is a bi-directional system that connects EVs to a power grid, enabling the collection and distribution of electricity between the two. This allows for intelligent balancing of the supply and demand of energy, including the better use of renewable sources and supports the stabilisation of the grid.

In this project, the 50 Honda e units will be allocated to 40 stations across Switzerland. A single Honda e can feed up to 20 kW of power back into the grid when plugged into a bi-directional charging station. This not only regulates power to stabilize the grid during periods of high demand and minimize bottlenecks in the distribution of energy, but also reduces the need for expensive grid expansions as demand for EV charging increases.

Using a cloud-to-cloud IT platform developed by fellow consortium member sun2wheel, the Honda Power Manager units can manage the available power for each EV in 15 minute cycles to assess and regulate the flow of electricity. The scheme will enable Honda to verify the relationship between vehicle usage frequency and V2G operation, actual V2G operation time and frequency, and how this impacts on customer convenience.

The actual demonstration of this project will start from September 2022, and will run until the end of 2023, and includes consortium members Mobility, EVTEC, sun2wheel, tiko, Novatlantis and ETH Zurich. The project is supported by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy.