The Current State of Bidirectional EV Charging in Canada

Sep 24, 2024 | 0 comments

Introduction

V2X, or Vehicle-to-Everything, is a new and exciting field that shows a lot of promise to further leverage the growing number of EVs in the world today. EVs aren’t unique solely because they can drive us around. What makes them distinctive is their batteries’ ability to hold significant energy, capable of providing backup power to homes or feeding back to the grid when it becomes strained—a novel feature compared to their internal combustion counterparts. The ability for the car we drive to work to then come home and act as a backup generator or a micro-power plant that can feed back to the grid is still relatively new. However, this potential game changer faces numerous hurdles before becoming widely available to everyday consumers. With new technologies come many challenges to move beyond the conceptual stage to commercial availability for ordinary people. The Electric Vehicle Association of Alberta has heard from many of our members about their interest in using bidirectional charging, but finding current information can be extremely difficult. This was the inspiration for this article.

 

A few things to keep in mind:

This is a fast-changing industry. The information in this article was current at the time of publishing, in June 2024. This information is also specific to Canada, as other regions in the world are at very different stages when it comes to this technology. Unfortunately, Canada in this case lags behind other regions of the world. In places like the UK home owners can already participate in V2G programs. Surely, changes will happen after this and we will not be able to update this article every time a change in the industry occurs. With that said a lot of research and conversations went into finding the current state of this ever-evolving industry. At the time of publishing this article, an average consumer was not able to purchase a CSA-approved bidirectional EV charger off the shelf, have it installed, inspected, and operational in their home for the purposes of backing up their home (V2H) or the grid (V2G). With that said, let’s get into some details about what this technology is and where we are currently at.

 

What is V2X?

V2X or Vehicle-to-Everything is a catch-all term that encompasses all of the different forms of bidirectional charging. The basic premise is that rather than an EV only acting as an electrical load, where it draws electricity, it can also act as a power source where the vehicle can discharge that energy to serve many different functions. There are many different forms that this can take but broadly speaking, it can be broken down into the following:

Vehicle-to-Load (V2L): This capability allows an EV to power a small load through a power outlet on the vehicle. Some EVs feature both 120-volt and 240-volt outlets. The 120-volt outlet can power small appliances and electronics, and it can also charge phones, much like in most vehicles. The 240-volt outlet can supply larger amounts of energy, enabling the powering of items such as welders, refrigerators, or even a small sound system, depending on your requirements. This feature is particularly useful for camping or working in remote locations. 

Vehicle-to-Home (V2H): These applications are centered around the ability of an EV to supply power to a home, providing an alternative energy source during power outages or high-demand periods. This functionality turns EVs into mobile energy storage units, capable of powering household appliances and reducing reliance on the grid. This can be utilized to provide backup power to a home or building either partially or entirely. 

There are several approaches to achieve this, depending on your objectives and the specific loads you intend to support. In the case of backing up a home, this could be a partial backup by pulling only the important loads off of your main electrical panel to a smaller panel, which is backed up in the case of a grid outage. Whole home backup is where the power feeds the entire main electrical panel and essentially provides power to the entire house. It’s essential to consider that the feasibility of each configuration depends on both the total output capacity of the vehicle battery and the power requirements of the loads you intend to back up.

Vehicle-to-Building (V2B): V2B extends this capability to larger buildings like commercial offices or apartment complexes. This is often done with very large EVs, such as electric school buses, or by combining the output of multiple EVs to feed a single source to help meet the larger electrical requirements of commercial buildings or apartment complexes.

V2G or Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G): Vehicle-to-Grid technology enables your EV to send energy from your vehicle back to the grid. This can be useful when the grid is very strained and in need of additional generation. It does this by communicating with the power grid to understand when there are periods of high demand, that current producers are having trouble keeping up with. EV owners are given a signal through an app that the grid has inadequate supply and asked if they would be willing to discharge energy for a financial incentive. This bidirectional energy transfer allows EVs to discharge stored energy in the vehicle back to the grid, providing a dynamic system that supports grid stability, enhances energy efficiency, and offers economic benefits to EV owners. This can offer a critical benefit to help stabilize the grid when it has limited supply and also shave the demand on central generators during peak demand periods. 

 

Why would consumers or grid providers support the use of V2X?

The total amount of energy that can be stored in a single EV is generally between 40-80 kWh. Batteries in larger electric vehicles like the F150 Lightning can be even larger at 100 kWh or more. According to ATCO, the average Alberta home uses about 7200 kWh per year or 20 kWh per day. This means that a single EV could power the average home, if required, for multiple days. Now where this gets really interesting is if you can call upon hundreds or even thousands of EVs to discharge their energy all at one time. This now becomes a significant amount of energy that can be extremely useful in different scenarios and comparable, or even larger in terms of output, to the centralized energy sources that most grids rely on today. 

To put this into perspective let’s look back at the grid alert event that hit Alberta on January 13, 2024. After the alert was announced energy usage in the province dropped by 200 MW (200,000 kW). The Hyundai IONIQ 5 is capable of outputting 3.6 kW in V2L applications while the Ford F150 Lightning can output 9.6 kW. That means that we would have needed 55,555 Hyundai IONIQ 5s or 20,833 Ford F-150 Lightnings to discharge to the grid at the same time to have had the same impact. There are currently approximately 10,000 EVs registered in Alberta as we have had lower adoption rates thus far compared to BC which has over 150,000 registered EVs. Keep in mind that Alberta has over 2.8 million gasoline vehicles registered. That means that if even ~2% of the registered gasoline vehicles in Alberta were EVs capable of V2G then they could have had a similar impact of pushing 200 MW back into the grid.

This is the idea behind approaches like virtual power plants (VPP) where many smaller batteries can be connected together in a network across many locations. VPPs can take on many different forms including interconnecting smart home thermostats or electric hot water heaters to help reduce energy use for short periods of time when the grid needs extra support to help relieve stress from peak demand. Another common application of VPPs are homes equipped with battery storage devices. It is easy to imagine how a VPP consisting of electrical vehicles could play a similar role of asking hundreds or thousands of connected EV to discharge simultaneously. 

 

Current state of V2X applications in Canada

In Canada, V2X technology is still in the pilot phase, with projects proceeding under special exceptions rather than full CSA-approved certifications on the hardware. The SPE-1000 process permits field testing of electrical equipment before formal standards are established. While this allows pilot projects to advance, the widespread adoption of the technology cannot happen before achieving full CSA electrical certification for bidirectional chargers. Unfortunately, this is not yet possible (at the time of publishing this article). The nuances of this will be explained in a bit more detail later.

With that said several groundbreaking pilot projects are currently underway in Canada related to bidirectional charging. It is important for field data to be gathered from these pilot projects in order to lay the groundwork required for widespread adoption. 

Here are a few recent examples of bidirectional EV charging pilot initiatives in Canada:

 

How does bidirectional EV charging actually work?

When we are talking about bidirectional chargers, there are a few different forms that this bidirectional flow of electricity can take, from a hardware perspective. The key differentiator is whether the inversion from DC to AC electricity is happening onboard the vehicle itself or offboard of the vehicle in the charger. Let’s discuss the two primary ways that this bidirectional charging can occur from a hardware perspective.

DC offboard charging: 

This is the most common in the industry at the moment. This is where the charger itself accepts the DC power out of the vehicle battery and the charger then inverts that power back to AC. This then feeds your home or back to the electrical grid. This charger is called “offboard” because the conversion and bidirectional power management occur outside of the vehicle, in the charging station itself.

  1. Bidirectional Power Flow:
  • Charging: The charger converts AC power from the grid to DC power to charge the EV’s battery.
  • Discharging: The charger also converts DC power from the EV’s battery to AC power. This can be sent back to the grid or used for other purposes, such as powering a home or building.
  • Fast Charging: DC off-board chargers typically support high power levels, enabling faster charging compared to onboard chargers. Onboard chargers are limited by the vehicle’s internal converter capacity.

AC onboard charging:

Onboard charging is where the hardware required for the inversion from DC to AC electricity is located on the vehicle itself rather than the charger. All EVs are equipped with the required components to take in AC electricity when plugged into a charger and invert that to DC electricity to then get pushed into the battery. The difference is not all EVs have the hardware to invert that energy from DC back to AC to be exported in a bidirectional charging application.

  1. Bidirectional Power Flow:
    • Charging: The vehicle’s onboard charger converts AC power from the grid to DC power to charge the EV’s battery.
    • Discharging: The vehicle’s onboard inverter converts DC power from the battery to AC power, which can be supplied back to the grid or used to power home appliances and other loads.
  2. Onboard Conversion:
    • Onboard Inverter: The EV must have an onboard inverter capable of handling bidirectional power flow. This inverter converts DC power from the battery to AC power for export.
    • Onboard Charger: This component is responsible for converting AC power from the grid into DC power to charge the battery.

 

Challenges and limitations

While bidirectional EV charging shows a lot of promise for what it can make possible for homes and businesses, there are currently many hurdles or limitations that need to be considered. The following outlines the current challenges and limitations that are present:

Battery degradation:

Regular discharging and recharging of EV batteries for grid services can potentially accelerate battery wear, resulting in the battery’s lifespan and overall performance being reduced. When an EV that participates in bidirectional charging is compared to one that does not, then the one that does will be exposed to additional battery cycles. This raises the concern of additional battery degradation due to cycles which would otherwise not be taken. To mitigate this, manufacturers are exploring advanced battery management systems and improved battery chemistries designed to handle the demands of bidirectional charging. The increased adoption of LFP (Lithium Iron Phosphate) batteries from manufactures such as Ford, Chevy, and BYD are great examples of this. Not only do many vehicles that these manufactures offer allow for bidirectional charging, the LFP chemistry has proven to offer superior resistance to degradation over many charging cycles. This is important when considering these batteries would be cycled more often when used for discharging energy for bidirectional use cases as well as for driving compared to driving alone.

Battery warranty:

One of the most consistent concerns for both vehicle OEMs and owners of EVs is whether participation in a V2X application will void their battery warranty. Many OEMs actually specify that any sort of bidirectional charging will void the warranty provided on the battery. This gives owners valid concerns which need to be addressed. Solutions could be to either reward the owner for taking this risk or by the OEMs agreeing to honour the battery warranty – even if an EV owner has participated in bidirectional charging. Addressing this concern requires collaboration between manufacturers, regulators, and consumers in developing warranty policies that support the use of bidirectional charging without penalizing owners.

Infrastructure challenges:

The limited availability of bidirectional chargers and compatible EVs restricts widespread adoption. Achieving CSA certification for these technologies is critical for market expansion. Additionally, the installation of bidirectional charging infrastructure involves significant costs and logistical challenges. This includes: upgrading electrical panels, installing transfer switches, and ensuring compliance with local building codes.

Technical and operational issues:

Effective energy management systems are needed to balance energy flow between EVs and the grid. These systems must be capable of dynamically adjusting to fluctuations in supply and demand, ensuring that energy is efficiently distributed without overloading the grid. The unpredictable availability of EVs for grid support adds complexity to this challenge, as vehicles may not always be plugged in when the grid needs them. Advanced forecasting and scheduling algorithms are being developed to optimize the use of available EVs for grid services. The presence of a common system that utilities and prosumer (producer/consumer) can both access to negotiate services and process transactions is still elusive.

 

Not all EVs are capable of bidirectional charging 

Currently, there are many EVs that are not capable of bidirectional charging. Only a handful of EVs that are available on the market today have the functionality to offer their user bidirectional charging capability. This is because the vehicles themselves need to have key pieces of hardware in order to make this possible. This critical hardware allows the vehicle to both accept AC power from the grid and invert that to DC power to put into the battery, as well as discharge DC power from the battery and invert it to AC to be used in bidirectional charging applications. The hardware must pull DC power out of the battery and convert that to AC power – which is what our homes and electrical grid run on. We explored the different forms this can take earlier regarding onboard and offboard charging. 

A few examples of EVs that are available in Canada capable of bidirectional EV charging  beyond simple V2L applications at the time of writing this article include:

  • Nissan Leaf
  • Kia EV6 & 9
  • Hyundai IONIQ 5 & 6
  • Tesla Cybertruck
  • Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV
  • Ford F150 Lighting
  • Cadillac LYRIQ (MY24)
  • Chevrolet Blazer (MY24)
  • Chevrolet Equinox (MY24)

 

Standards and protocols in Canada

One major barrier to the wider adoption of bidirectional EV charging is the lack of established standards. The Canadian Standards Association (CSA) works with industry stakeholders to develop these standards. Recent progress includes the publication of CSA C22.2 NO. 348, which addresses electric vehicle power export equipment.

For more detailed information, refer to Umer Khan’s article on the role of CSA in electrifying the transportation sector: The Bigger Picture: The Role of Codes and Standards in Electrifying the Transportation Sector.

The role of the CSA is crucial in ensuring that bidirectional charging equipment meets stringent safety and performance standards. This involves rigorous testing and certification processes to verify that the equipment can operate reliably under various conditions. As these standards become more widely adopted, they will provide a clear framework for manufacturers, installers, and consumers, facilitating the broader deployment of V2X technology.

 

Where are we currently with the standards and protocols in Canada?

In researching for this article, it became clear that one of the largest limitations of this technology being more widely adopted is the electrical standards. This spurred a conversation, directly with CSA, to get to the bottom of this. The standards written by CSA fall into several categories which can be quite confusing. To clarify, the CSA does not directly write the standards themselves. They work with members of the industry to facilitate the process of writing standards. In addition, it is to be noted that the role that CSA plays goes far beyond EVs and touches all electrical equipment available in Canada. 

During multiple conversations with professionals involved in both electrical equipment installation and even city inspectors, it is clear that most are not aware that the standards for EV power export have actually been written. CSA C22.2 NO. 348, Electric vehicle power export equipment has been written and has been published by the CSA – https://www.csagroup.org/store/product/CSA_C22.2_NO._348:23/. The next important step is publishing part two of this electrical code which will provide installation instructions for this type of equipment. This has been published but the final steps required before release were not available at the time of publishing this article. For those who aren’t aware, the Canadian Electrical code is published in several parts. Part I of the Canadian Electrical Code (CEC) focuses on the safety standards for electrical installations. It provides comprehensive rules and guidelines to ensure the safe installation, operation, and maintenance of electrical systems. This part is primarily concerned with general safety practices and procedures that apply to all types of electrical installations, aiming to protect people and property from electrical hazards.

Part II of the CEC, on the other hand, is a compilation of individual standards that specifically address the evaluation and certification of electrical equipment and installations. This part provides detailed requirements for the design, construction, and performance of electrical products and systems to ensure they meet safety and performance criteria. Essentially, while Part I sets the overarching safety framework, Part II provides the specific criteria for certifying and approving electrical equipment used within that framework.

See below for a number of the standards that CSA has provided related to different aspects of EVs and charging equipment:

CSA Infographic

CSA Image: Battery Electric Vehicles and Energy Management

Source: CSA – https://www.csagroup.org/article/battery-electric-vehicles-and-energy-management/

As you can see Part 2 of the electrical code related to electric vehicle power export equipment has now been published. Once a standard is developed, Nationally Recognized Testing Labratory’s must establish a certification program, which takes a little time. It is unclear at the time of publication if a program has already been developed for CSA C22.2 NO. 348,. Once the program is created, the equipment can be certified to the standard which we should expect to see in the coming years. These standards are equivalent to UL 9741 which is the standard in the USA. 

 

Future outlook

While these limitations present significant challenges, ongoing research and development, coupled with advances in battery technology, grid infrastructure, and regulatory frameworks, are expected to address many of these issues. One promising area of research involves the development of solid-state batteries, which offer higher energy density, improved safety, and longer lifespans compared to conventional lithium-ion batteries. These advancements could make bidirectional charging more viable by reducing the impact of frequent cycling on battery health. As the adoption of electric vehicles grows and renewable energy sources become more integrated into power systems, V2G technology holds considerable potential to enhance grid resilience, optimize energy use, and provide economic benefits to EV owners. We at EVAA look forward to following along as this industry progresses and the incredible potential inside of the EVs driving around our country can be further unlocked. 

 

Conclusion

Bidirectional EV charging holds great promise for transforming our energy landscape. Although Canada is still in the early stages of adoption, progress is being made. As standards are developed and infrastructure improves, bidirectional charging is poised to become a valuable tool in our pursuit of a more sustainable and resilient energy future. With continued investment in research and development, policy support, and collaboration between stakeholders – the vision of a connected, bidirectional energy ecosystem is within reach.

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