Electric car owners can sell electricity back to the grid in Nissan trial
Electric vehicle owners could soon make money from selling electricity back to the grid.
Nissan, which builds some of its electric cars in its Sunderland factory, has launched a new trial in the UK which it claims could revolutionise energy supply.
Owners of the Nissan Leaf will be able to charge their cars during low demand times and then sell any surplus left in the battery back to the national grid at times of high demand.
Around 100 Leaf and Nissan's electric van owners will take part in the trial with energy firm Enel.
The car maker calculates that if all of its 18,000 electric vehicles on the road were connected with the Vehicle-To-Grid (V2G) scheme, they would have the equivalent output of 180 MW power plant and has the potential to power more than an entire country if scaled up to include all the electric cars which are evenutally expected to be on Britain's roads.
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Nissan will also embark on another new scheme, in which old batteries from its electric vehicles will be turned into domestic storage units for which can be used in the same way, giving homeowners greater control.
The x-storage, in collaboration with power management firm Eaton, will be available from September for pre-order.
The new schemes were revealed at an event where the car maker revealed that its 50,000th electric car rolled of the production line of its Sunderland plant five years after the Leaf first went on sale.