Nuvve, Lion Electric In Vehicle-to-Grid Collaboration

Nuvve Corp., a San Diego-based green energy technology company, and the Lion Electric Co., a Canadian original equipment manufacturer of all-electric heavy-duty vehicles, have announced a collaboration to launch vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology as a standard feature of Lion’s zero-emission school buses.

Lion recently launched LionA, an all-electric mini school bus, on top of an existing portfolio of electric vehicles, including the LionC and LionD school buses and a range of electric trucks. Lion said it shares electric technology across its different vehicle platforms, which means that the experience and learnings from its six million miles of real-world operation are transferable to all of its products.

With this collaboration, Lion’s buses and Nuvve’s V2G technology will be fully integrated, which will enable the batteries of Lion vehicles to dynamically store and discharge energy when plugged in and controlled by Nuvve’s software platform.

Nuvve and Lion have already partnered on key projects demonstrating the feasibility of V2G for school districts and utilities in California and New York. A joint project in White Plains, N.Y., is currently in operation with bidirectional power flow.

“We have been designing around V2G implementation on our platforms so as to provide our customers with the most advanced technology currently available,” said Marc Bédard, CEO and founder of Lion Electric. “Nuvve brings its cutting edge and experienced aggregation platform to complement our robust product offering, giving our customers added value in the process.”

Nuvve has more than 10 years of experience in V2G projects and deployments with operations across four continents providing several levels of services. V2G can enable a more efficient use of energy on the site at which the vehicles are parked by intelligently managing the loads of energy in conjunction with local buildings. Customers can save money through reduced energy costs since EVs can be charged when electricity demand is low and costs are optimized.

Furthermore, Nuvve’s V2G platform offers specialized aggregation services that pool together the collective energy stored in multiple EV’s batteries to create a virtual power plant (VPP). From this VPP, energy and power may be sold on energy markets, both at the local level and at the system level, creating additional savings.

“Lion’s modular platform approach to designing electric vehicles provides an ideal basis for integrating V2G and enabling all of their medium and heavy vehicles to serve new purposes such as providing grid services,” said Gregory Poilasne, CEO and chairman of Nuvve. “There are many use cases for vehicles like school buses, delivery fleets, and refuse trucks that are parked for many hours during the day and overnight that make their batteries ideal for what V2G can do to stabilize the grid.”