A North London bus garage is set to become a ‘virtual power station’, generating electricity from buses when not in use. Following a transformation to garage nearly 100 new zero-emission electric buses, Northumberland Park is now one of the biggest electric bus facilities in Europe. The project, called Bus2Grid, is believed to be the world’s largest vehicle-to-grid (V2G) trial site.
V2G technology enables energy stored in an electric vehicle’s battery to be fed back into the electricity network. By recharging when demand is low and putting energy into the grid when it is high, V2G helps manage the peaks and troughs, balance the network and make it more efficient. If the entire London bus fleet of around 9,000 vehicles were to be converted with the technology being used in the Bus2Grid project, it could theoretically provide enough energy to supply more than 150,000 homes.
The Bus2Grid project will be led by SSE Enterprise in partnership with the Mayor of London, Transport for London (TfL) and Go-Ahead London. The initial trial will use the batteries of 28 state-of-the-art double decker buses, capable of returning over 1MW energy to the grid.