Climate-tech start-up Electric Frog Company announced this week that it has provided free use of a Nissan LEAF electric vehicle (EV) to the Burrillville Wastewater Treatment Facility in Rhode Island, in a first use of a customer vehicle to support the New England electric grid. When not in use by Burrillville employees the EV will be plugged into a bidirectional charger and monitored by energy management software to transfer power back to the grid on 24-hour notice to help meet peak demand.
Electric Frog partnered with vehicle-to-grid (V2G) company Fermata Energy to install its bidirectional charger and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) software to manage charging of the EV at the Burrillville facility and deliver power on call to the utility.
“This is a unique effort to use an EV to help supply grid power on call,” said John Isberg, Vice President of Customer Sales and Solutions at National Grid. “We welcome this significant step toward a smarter, cleaner and more reliable electric grid of the future.”
National Grid, which serves large parts of New England and New York, offers an incentive in Rhode Island and Massachusetts for customer batteries under their ConnectedSolutions program. The incentive amount is based on the amount of power delivered to the grid during times of peak demand on hot summer afternoons.
“This is the future,” said Brent Alderfer, Founder and CEO of the Electric Frog Company. “It is very exciting to be able to offer an economic electric vehicle to the customer and electric grid reliability to the utility. This is the long-promised ‘vehicle to grid’ advantage at work for the consumer and the environment.”
“Through this partnership we will make EVs affordable for all drivers and we are confident that we will accelerate the adoption of EVs along with the transition to renewable energy on the grid,” said David Slutzky, Founder and CEO of Fermata Energy. “We are excited to see our V2X operations at work in Burrillville.”
