Increasing network stability, lowering electricity costs, and contributing to climate protection - that is the vision that Audi and electrical installations manufacturer Hager Group are pursuing.

The incorporation of the electric car into the domestic grid is at the core of an innovative research project on bidirectional charging.

This offers major advantages in combination with a Photovoltaic (PV) system in particular. Excess PV electricity can be stored temporarily and output as needed. Audi has committed to the objectives of the Paris Climate Agreement and is working on making its vehicle fleet CO₂-neutral by 2050.

In order to achieve this aim, the brand is pursuing a broad electric offensive that involves launching around 20 fully electric models by 2025.

Bidirectional charging focuses mainly on use cases where home owners use their own PV system to benefit from cost-optimised charging with their domestically generated electricity.

The electric car stores the excess electricity from the PV system that is not used by appliances in the house. Bidirectional charging also provides a security of supply that extends beyond pure cost optimisation. In the event of a blackout, the system can supply the house with energy via the high-performance battery or it can even operate a building without a grid connection independently in what is known as stand-alone operation.

Hence, the electric car is to evolve into part of an increasingly broad mobility offer and become an element of the sustainable energy transition. As the generation of electricity is not always constant, there is a need to store the generated energy that the grid cannot use.

With the increase in electric cars, the number of mobile energy storage units also rises. This offers great potential, provided that the storage capacity can be used intelligently.

The joint research project with the Hager Group has proven that customers who have their own PV system can design their mobility to be optimised in terms of cost and CO₂ consumption while taking some of the burden off the grid at the same time.

As a positive side effect, customers who own an electric car from Audi can make an important contribution to the success of the energy transition. The intelligent use of the battery in the vehicle also opens up possibilities to use an existing resource that was previously used for mobility purposes alone in a sustainable way.