Nissan South Africa showcased its ground-breaking vehicle-to-home technology at Sustainability Week 2017 in Tshwane.
Nissan’s Director of Corporate Affairs and Communication, Wonga Mesatywa, and Hiten Parmar, Director of the uYilo e-Mobility Programme with which Nissan partners, also spoke at the event, highlighting the industry’s responsibility in addressing climate change.
“Our goal is to achieve a zero emission society and we believe that the innovative technology which Nissan is currently developing will go a long way in helping to realise this objective,” says Mesatywa.
A leader in electric vehicle technology, Nissan’s award-winning Leaf has become a global best-seller with more than 230,000 sales worldwide.
The Leaf is fueled by a powerful lithium-ion battery which has the added advantage of bi-directional energy transfer capability. This allows Leaf owners to use the vehicle’s battery capacity for a variety of applications, other than charging and mobility.
The integration of electric vehicles into the grid will radically change the energy landscape, allowing each Nissan EV owner to actively contribute to the stability of the national grid.
During the day, solar energy can be used to power the home and at night, when little energy is needed in the home, lower cost energy can be drawn from the grid to recharge the car. Then, during peak times, the car can put electricity back into the home to reduce the household energy bill.
It is during these peak seasons when large volumes of energy are being drawn from the grid that electric vehicles are able to give back power to support the national infrastructure, stabilising the amount of energy drawn collectively by using the car as a personal power station.
A highlight at Sustainability Week was a demonstration of how Nissan’s groundbreaking vehicle-to-home technology can be used to power small household items and electronic devices.
The demonstration was conducted in partnership with the uYilo eMobility Programme – hosted by Port Elizabeth’s Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University engineering innovation hub eNtsa – which is currently exploring the local development of the bi-directional technology.
“uYilo has established specialised facilities and developed key expertise to support the electric vehicle industry in South Africa. A field testing programme is active within uYilo where the Nissan Leaf is used to evaluate interoperability between the various ecosystem components. Driver usage patterns, data collection, second-life battery integration as well as smart energy management for EV charging are key outputs from the project,” says Parmar.
For more information, visit the Nissan website.