en.Wedoany.com Reported - E.ON, in collaboration with a cross-industry alliance representing automotive, grid operations, and research institutions, has launched the pilot phase of the funded BDL Next project, advancing the testing of bidirectional charging technology under conditions of large-scale deployment. The pilot phase will examine the conditions for scaling this technology in real-world environments, aiming to seamlessly integrate electric vehicles into broader energy markets, supporting grid stability while bringing the energy transition to the household level.
The pilot commenced with project partners handing over vehicles to participating households at BMW Welt in Munich and will run for several months. Its test results will inform the future regulatory framework, covering control standards, metering concepts, and methods for integrating new forms of flexibility into existing market and grid processes. The BDL Next project aims to establish a cross-manufacturer, scalable open flexibility system by combining interoperability with photovoltaic systems, home storage, and intelligent energy management.
As electric mobility accelerates and distributed generation scales up, the energy system's demand for flexibility continues to grow, particularly at the distribution grid level. Intelligently managed flexibility becomes a key tool for maintaining grid stability. Stefan Padberg, Head of Innovation at E.ON, stated that the project represents a shift from isolated household-level solutions to fully integrated, system-compatible approaches that are scalable, measurable, and capable of actively supporting the grid.
The BDL Next project focuses on coordinating thousands of small household energy assets. By specifically activating the flexibility of electric vehicles and enabling real-time control, the project alleviates system-wide pressure while avoiding disruption to users' daily lives. The project also tackles the technical challenges of precisely metering and allocating energy flows, including identifying when electricity is fed back into the grid and verifying its origin as renewable energy.
The project simultaneously explores how household-level flexibility can be integrated into existing grid and market mechanisms through standardized communication signals between transmission system operators, distribution system operators, and participating households. These research findings lay the groundwork for the Redispatch 3.0 framework, a future congestion management solution that will, for the first time, utilize distributed resources at the low-voltage level.
Another key focus of the pilot is the intelligent coupling of electric vehicles with residential photovoltaic systems. Through the BDL Next project, vehicles can support self-consumption, participate in vehicle-to-grid (V2G) flexibility markets, and contribute to grid stability, thereby transforming electric vehicles into intelligent hubs connecting local energy management with broader power system needs.
For bidirectional charging to enter the mass market, solutions need to be easy for households to use and sufficiently versatile to adapt to various home and mobility scenarios. This requires full interoperability between vehicles, wall-mounted charging stations, energy management systems, photovoltaic installations, and home storage. Therefore, the BDL Next project is designed around open standards and close cooperation between automakers, energy companies, grid operators, and research institutions, aiming to aggregate household flexibility at the scale required to support the future energy system. The project is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, coordinated by the Research Center for Energy Economics (FfE), and was launched in November 2023 for a three-year term. Alliance members include BMW, Bayernwerk Netz, TenneT, E.ON, and technology partners such as KEO and Compleo, with academic institutions like the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, the University of Passau, and the EBZ Business School also participating.
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