 Hi, my name is Bjorn Stamberg. I'm a researcher at the Australian National University. Today, we're in an electric vehicle, but we're not going to talk about how fun it is to drive. Instead, we're going to talk about how it can create value while it's parked. Now the way that electric vehicles can create value while parked is that they have a battery inside of them, and that battery can provide services to the outside world. This is called vehicle-to-grid technology, and it's a great two-pronged attack on cleaning up both the transport system and our electricity system. So let's get out and see how that works. What we're doing is deploying 51 electric vehicles into the grid that are monitoring the frequency whenever they're plugged in. The frequency tells them whether there's too much or too little generation in the electricity supply. You can think of this like when riding a bicycle. When you start riding up a hill, the load increases on you, and the frequency with which you pedal decreases. On the other hand, when you're coming down a hill, the load is easier, and your frequency of pedaling is going to increase. Similarly, in the electricity system the frequency tells you whether there's too much load, too much usage, or whether there's too much generation. And when there's too much generation, they'll charge the battery, and when there's too little generation our electric vehicles will discharge energy from their batteries into the grid. Why is it that batteries, like the ones in our electric vehicles, are so useful for the clean electricity system? This is because the electricity generated at every second of the day has to be equal to the electricity used if these things ever come too far out of line, and that's going to cause a blackout. And this is quite a hard challenge for the grid operator because humans are always running around turning lights on and off together with air conditioners and other things that use electricity. So it's really hard to keep these things in balance at every second of the day. Historically we've relied on the kinetic energy in fossil generators to help us keep generation and usage in balance. This works because those generators have turbines that weigh hundreds of tonnes and so when they're spinning they have a lot of kinetic energy. Now in the clean electricity system solar and wind don't provide any inertia because they don't have those spinning masses and are instead connected to the grid using electronics. Having a lot of inertia in our power system is really a double-edged sword. If you think of a heavy truck racing down a highway it has a lot of inertia. This inertia is really helpful when you start up a hill because it helps the truck keep its speed. But it's going to be challenging when you come down the other side of the hill and race into a sharp corner it's going to be really hard to control that truck around the corner. If you compare that to a motorcycle, say an electric motorcycle, the driver's going to have to be a lot more attentive at the beginning of the hill because it has very little inertia to bring it up the hill but it's going to be a lot easier to control around the corners. In the power system we're now moving from this heavy inertia system to a very light inertia system because solar and wind don't provide inertia. But like that motorcycle they can react very very quickly to changes in demand. The electricity stored in batteries provides you with that extra storage of power that you can draw upon when more is needed and you can also put extra energy into when you have too much electricity being generated. So that's how batteries can help balance generation and usage in the grid. And then in our project which is called REBS for realising electric vehicle to grid services, we're using the batteries in electric vehicles to provide power back to the grid. Now REBS is a big project with seven organisations that span the electricity system as well as the transport system because all of these parties are going to be involved in having the batteries in electric vehicles provide services to the outside worlds. REBS is going beyond previous trials but not just demonstrating the technical capabilities of cars and charges to provide vehicle to grid services but by doing social research to understand what value this brings to customers and economic and business model innovation research to understand how vehicle to grid can work for businesses in the electricity system and in the transport system. The REBS project is really moving vehicle to grid technology from the niche to normality by understanding what value it brings to customers and to stakeholders throughout the transport and electricity systems. Bringing this all together REBS is making vehicle to grid a service for the mainstream.