Dusseldorf. In the dispute over the rules on the use of electric cars as electricity storage devices, the Federal Network Agency has surprisingly given in. On Thursday, the Bonn authority wants to officially present the more than 200-page set of rules on the “Specification for the market integration of storage and charging points” (MiSpeL) – with three essential changes. This emerges from the final status of the paper, which is available to Handelsblatt.
“All players want the same thing: to integrate electromobility into the electricity market simply, simply and as quickly as possible,” said Federal Network Agency boss Klaus Müller to the Handelsblatt. There has been a technical discussion in the past few days and the regulations have been revised again. “Good factual arguments convince this authority,” said Müller, justifying the move.
The result is a point victory for the auto industry. The Federal Network Agency accommodates the industry in all points of criticism. But the new rules are also a real breakthrough for storage in general. These are the details.
In principle, MiSpeL enables the flexible use of storage, i.e. storing electricity from the grid or from the roof and feeding it back into the grid without losing government funding. Until now, both were not possible at the same time.
With the changes, e-cars, i.e. their charging points, are now on an equal footing with electricity storage devices “wherever possible,” Müller promised. In the previous version, the Federal Network Agency had made significant restrictions.
For electric cars, the exact measurement of the electricity stored and fed back was necessarily linked to the installation of a second intelligent meter. If you don't have your own solar system, you can now use the so-called "delimitation option" with a single smart meter.
Whether with a solar system, storage or without - anyone who has their own charging point can now theoretically make their electric car available as a battery for the grid or use it as a power storage device for their own home. “Every bidirectional electric car can be integrated into the market at any bidirectional charging point,” says the network agency’s paper.
According to experts, the potential is enormous, especially with regard to savings in system costs. According to a study by the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovations, around 22 billion euros could be saved per year, especially in network expansion and control.
There is also a lot at stake for the German auto industry. The significantly cheaper competition from China threatens to overtake it in the future market for electric vehicles. At the same time, domestic manufacturers are cutting thousands of jobs. BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen and Co. hope that the use of electric cars as storage devices will not only increase sales figures for German electric vehicles. In addition, the technology opens up a new business model.
This is primarily about the service of charging the electricity into the electric car when it is cheap, i.e. there is a lot of electricity available, and then feeding it back into the grid when it is expensive because it is needed. Energy suppliers such as Eon and Octopus Energy already have suitable offers on the market. The VW electricity subsidiary Elli is also relying on bidirectional charging as a future business model.
The criticism was correspondingly severe last week after an initial work status was published. The industry was particularly concerned about the proposed safety deduction in the “flat-rate option”. For users with solar systems who do not want or cannot install a second meter, a simplified variant of the delimitation option was introduced - the flat rate option. Here too, improvements were made again.
The feed-in directly above this limit falls into a buffer zone. There is neither funding nor reimbursement of fees or surcharges for this part. Only amounts of electricity that are above this limit are considered to be electricity fed back from the car battery and would therefore be exempt from surcharges and fees.
The Federal Network Agency has now reduced this buffer zone by more than half from the originally planned factor of 0.5 to a factor of 0.2. In this way, consumers can more quickly reach the area where it is worthwhile to feed back the grid power. The buffer zone is intended to prevent possible misuse.
But now the industry also sees “an obligation to bring vehicles, bidirectional charging and wallboxes onto the market and to really enable flexibility,” said Müller. At least from a regulatory perspective, there is now nothing standing in the way of this.
