Hyundai Mobis Develops Two-Way EV Charger, Enabling V2G To “Fill Up the City”

OCT 19 2017 BY MARK KANE 22

Hyundai Mobis has announced the development of a two-way on-board charger (V2G) for future electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles.

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It’s not clear at this point whether Hyundai Mobis ultimately will be supplying those chargers for upcoming new Hyundai cars (like the new 200+ mile Kona EV), but the company believes that the market of V2X technology (Vehicle To Everything, including V2G) to be worth KRW30 trillion (nearly $27 billion) in 2025which seems a touch optimistic to us, but we will go with it.

Full details are not yet available, but Hyundai said that four plug-ins with V2G could power 20 households for a day, which would be especially important in an emergency situation, or just shorter brown/black-out situations.

“V2G refers to using the idle power while plug-in environment-friendly cars, such as EV and PHEV, connected to the grid, are parked. The electric vehicle is charged while connected to the grid, and the electricity remaining after the day’s operation is transmitted (and/or discharged) back to the grid. The electric vehicle effectively becomes a moving Energy Storage System (ESS).

The electric power supplied by vehicles can be used as emergency power in households and cities. Four electric vehicles can supply energy that can be used by 20 households in a day. If more vehicles are available, the surplus power can be secured and large-scale blackouts may be prevented. Damages to industries due to blackouts are estimated to be KRW 650 billion a year in Korea.

The industry estimates that if V2G is applied to 100,000 vehicles, 500MW power, equivalent to the power generation of a thermoelectric power plant, will be secured. Experts say that “In general, automobiles are being used less than 20% of the time, and they are parked in the remaining time,” and it will be very effective. Currently, pilot V2G projects are being actively carried out in Japan, Denmark, the US and China.

To implement V2G, ▲ plug-in environment-friendly vehicles, ▲bi-directional OBCs, ▲bi-directional charging stations, and ▲the discharge rate system are necessary. Among them, ‘bi-directional OBC,’ key to power conversion, is a next-generation part that is not widely available around the world, thus has never been mass-produced except for pilot projects.

Hyundai Mobis has participated in the ‘V2G test bed project,’ which Korea Electronic Power Corporation (KEPCO) has been conducting since 2015, and was responsible for developing the bi-directional OBC. Hyundai Mobis is the first in Korea to install the bi-directional OBC in environment-friendly vehicles, verify safety performance, and develop it to the commercial level in a test bed project.

The ‘bi-directional OBC’ has bi-directional power control circuits,’ such as the AC↔DC converter and the step-up/down converter, for bi-directional conversion of DC/AC. Hyundai Mobis started the vehicle testing according to the virtual power scenario earlier this year, and finished it at the end of last month, while actively commencing with vehicle testing linked to KEPCO’s real-time power data from this month.

The actual vehicle verification begins with a dedicated charging station diagnosing the power state of the vehicle, such as battery efficiency and capacity. The optimal V2G schedule is then created according to the hypothetical scenarios in which the power supply, cost, and load are analyzed. Vehicles receive this data signal, and repeats charging and discharging according to a predetermined schedule.

In future smart cities, many electric vehicles will be charged at the same time. To reduce the resulting power load, V2G is essential. The successful development of the bi-directional OBC enabled Hyundai Mobis to respond more proactively to the global V2X (Vehicle To Everything, including V2G) market, which is expected to grow to KRW30 trillion ($26.7 billion) by 2025.”

Categories: Charging, Hyundai


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22 Comments on "Hyundai Mobis Develops Two-Way EV Charger, Enabling V2G To “Fill Up the City”"

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64 kWh would be nice in a blackout. That would run my apartment for a week.


But on day 8 you’d be stuck there!

How do they expect to get around the power requirements? I looked in to getting a Powerwall and would have had to modify my panels a bit because of the size of my PV array and if both the Powerwall and the panels were putting out peak levels it would have gone over some threshold my panel could handle.

Replace Powerwall with car with V2G and the same problem exists.


I’m pretty sure by day 8 the power would be back on.


Thats what the Puerto Ricans thought too 😉


That is what residents in the Santa Cruz mountains thought after the Loma Prieta quake of 1989.

jim stack


Your panels would put out during the day and charge your Power Wall. The Power Wall would only put out after the Sun goes down to cover nights. They don’t both provide power at the same time. They help each other.
V2G would charge if there was extra Solar power and help if needed Off Peak at night so you are never without power. A car sits about 20-23 hours a day so V2G put it to work. It just ticles the battery and nver more that you set.


Yet they could. That was the problem.

Realistically the Powerwall and PV panels wouldn’t be outputting at peak at the same time however because of some code/rule it had to be modified (beefed up to handle a worst care scenario that likely wouldn’t ever happen).

But really though as someone who is on TOU I would absolutely love to have my panels churning out power and passing it to the grid along with the Powerwall or the V2G capable car and pocket the 50 cents per kWh credit and then charge up at night at 20 cents 😀


My guess is that you are talking about upgrading and older 100 amp service to a 200 amp service. I’m pretty sure all new houses would come with 200 amp anyway as would a large chunk of any houses built in the last 40 years. In my house (same as many) the 3 biggest loads are going to be the oven, the hot water heater, and the clothes dryer. 2 of those 3 each have a dedicated 40 amp breaker circuit. If you were to add another 40 amp breaker to feed the charger system in the vehicle, you’d pop that 100 amp service past its capacity. I regularly run over 2500 kwh per month most of which is those 3 appliances. If you have gas stove/water heater/dryer, your power needs are quite low.

(⌐■_■) Trollnonymous

V2G, No thanks.

Devin Serpa

Hyundai needs liquid cooled batteries, not creative two way charging.


True, but we are talking about the Hyundai MOBIS company, which is a part supplier that supplies such parts to other automakers.


V2x is the way to go. I’m in. Put it in the Kona and/or Niro and we’re ready.

@DJ -Are you sure you can’t discharge the powerwall concurrently with the PV? The modulator should be able to understand flow out to the house/grid from multiple sources. It’s not like an inverter doesn’t run from multiple input strings


I think his problem is different. Imagine there was a load that required maximum output from both the solar panels and the battery at the same time. That would melt his house’s wires and such because they weren’t built to handle that much power.


Doesn’t quite work that way. The inverters will only push so much current through the pipelines. Powerwall has a limiter on it — IIRC 3kw is the sustained with peak 4.5, but don’t know if that’s solid #.


Some utilities have programs to pay money to be able to curtail peak load remotely just for short time few times a year. I.e. A/C, water heater can be disconnected.

It may be useful if it the cost is reasonable. Both Toyota and Honda sell Chademo power exporters in Japan, but the price would be thousands of dollars, and you need to able to recharge the battery somehow during prolonged outage if you want it just for backup.

EVs can be controlled too with the program that is now covering most of Cali.


I would be rather skeptical of any claim that a BEV could provide power to a house’s electrical plugs, even if the BEV was equipped with a V2H (Vehicle to Home) two-way charger. I’m reminded of the stories about people in Florida who found that their rooftop solar power systems would not provide power to their house when the grid went down after the recent hurricane, because their solar power systems were installed to be tied into the grid.

And that’s even aside from the question of whether or not it’s wise to pay more for a two-way onboard charger, when the V2H system would be so rarely used.


Yeah, if your home system isn’t designed to separate from the grid you cannot turn it on during a power outage.

To redo your house so that it can separate from the grid and then the big stuff doesn’t turn on and overload the car (since Hyundai seems to imply 5kW power output) would cost a significant amount of money.

I personally feel like this kind of capability is a natural match for a work truck. It’s a job site generator. Or for vehicles that are used for camping.

But I don’t know that I see it being big for homes, especially since typically when your solar system is producing surplus power your car is at work, not home.

Working on this technology is important, but I think it’ll mostly languish until batteries are cheap enough that you install a separate dedicated set in your home for power backup and demand leveling.


You’ve missed out on the updates to tech over the past few years. Powerwall 2 does this fine as backup generator if wired into the house correctly—and doesn’t need large overhaul of box either.

For PV arrays – newer installs like the SolarEdge come out of the box ready to support PV-to home without the grid tied issue. In the past that was an issue for safety and grid tie agreements with utilities, but no longer an issue.

Our SolarEdge can power the house in an outage. The Powerwall 2.0 is intended to power well into the night.

The beauty of V2H would be not to spend the 12k on the PW 2.0 7Kw battery when you’ve already paid for a 60+ KwH battery sitting in the driveway idle


Issue with using the battery of an EV for grid support is, that it would impact the total amount of cycles used to drive the car. I doubt, any utility would pay the adjusted cost for a customer’s early replacement of a battery pack. I’d rather go off grid then support the grid with my EV in case of an outage.

Some utilities subsidize the purchase of backup battery packs if they get limited control over them. We already have a rewards program in Cali that pays you if you allow the utility to dictate when you charge so it would not be a big jump for them to pay you for the ability to stabilize the grid using some of your stored ev energy.


V2G as it’s suggested is stupid. I’m not going to let random people degrade my battery simply because the utility sucks at providing stable power from other sources.

V2H (vehicle to house, like a generator, where grid is disabled) is better. You are the only consumer and you alone take the responsibility for degradation.

I see the electrical grid, at least for residential applications, as soon-to-be obsolete. Homes should produce their own power, store their own power, and consume only their power. Centralized electricity generation for residential use is an obsolete idea.