United Kingdom-based SSE Enterprise is working on a vehicle-to-grid (V2G) project at London’s Northumberland Park bus garage, where electricity would be generated from buses when it’s not ferrying passengers.

The ‘Bus2Grid’ garage will function as a ‘virtual power station’ using V2G technology and feed the energy stored in the vehicle’s battery back into the grid. The buses would be recharged when the demand is low, and power will be fed back to the grid when the demand peaks.

According to SSE, if all 9,000 buses plying on London’s streets are brought under the Bus2Grid project, then 150,000 homes could be powered.

The Bus2Grid project led by SSE Enterprise in partnership with Go-Ahead London, BYD, Leeds University, and U.K. Power Networks, will employ 28 state-of-the-art double-decker buses, capable of returning over 1 MW of energy to the grid in its trial run.

The three-year trial is funded by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), and the Office for Low Emission Vehicles (OLEV) with the support of Innovate U.K.

SSE Enterprise claims to have electrified most of the electric-bus garages in London, wherein a bi-directional charging mechanism will return the energy stored in the batteries back to the grid. This Bus2Grid technique would explore both the commercial and social benefits of the energy and passenger transportation systems by developing services for the national grid, regional distribution network operators, bus operators, and transport authorities.

Meanwhile, in India, the Department of Heavy Industry under the Ministry of Heavy Industry and Public Enterprises has granted approval for 5,595 electric buses to be deployed in 64 cities under the Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Hybrid and Electric Vehicles (FAME-II) program.

In June 2019, the Department of Heavy Industry had invited expressions of interest from state transport departments for the deployment of 5,000 electric buses under the FAME II program.