MAN Truck & Bus has trialled bidirectional charging on an electric truck, as part of its Spirit-E research project.
The pilot, conducted at transport firm Spedition Schmid in Germany, used an MAN eTGX with 480kWh of usable battery capacity to show how a truck can both draw energy from and feed it back into external systems.
According to MAN, intelligent energy management has the potential to reduce electricity costs by between 10% and 20%, particularly for regional operations covering less than 100,000km a year.
Real use cases have already been trialled, including supplying a building with electricity overnight using eTrucks, as well as charging an electric car from a truck’s battery.
However, bidirectional charging is not suitable for all truck applications – for example, where operations do not allow for longer dwell times at a depot.
Vehicle-to-site allows fleets to use stored energy to power buildings or avoid peak electricity costs, while vehicle-to-vehicle enables trucks to charge other electric vehicles directly.
Also, vehicle-to-grid allows operators to feed energy back into the public network during periods of high demand.
Spirit-E partners include the Technical University of Munich (TUM) as consortium lead, Fraunhofer IEE, the Research Centre for Energy Economics (FfE), SBRS (Shell), TenneT, Hubject, Consolinno Energy, and MAN Truck & Bus.
Georg Grüneißl, Head of Product Strategy at MAN Truck & Bus, said, “Bidirectional charging is transforming the role of the electric truck.
“Our eTrucks effectively become power banks on wheels that can help lower energy costs while strengthening the energy system as a whole.
“Spirit‑E has demonstrated the substantial potential of this technology and how electric trucks can actively contribute to the energy transition in the future.”
