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Interview with Elke Temme

“Every buyer will become the owner of an energy reservoir on wheels”

Elke Temme has led the newly created Charging and Energy business segment at Volkswagen Group Components since the beginning of 2021. She is a trained bank business assistant and comes from energy company RWE/innogy where she held various positions for 18 years.

Volkswagen Way to Zero Convention
Elke Temme: “Every buyer will become the owner of an energy reservoir on wheels”

Ms Temme, electric vehicles will soon be able to feed electricity back into the grid. What does this mean for Volkswagen customers?

Bi-directional charging opens up many new possibilities. Purchasers of an electric car will not only be acquiring a vehicle, they will also become the owner of an energy reservoir on wheels – which can also serve as a buffer. Our job is to make sure this can be utilised.

What can Volkswagen contribute to a so-called vehicle-to-grid system?

First of all, we are contributing by enabling our MEB models to be offer bi-directional charging in the near future. Our vision is an IT solution that allows us to connect the vehicle battery to the power grid on behalf of our customers. But this also requires the corresponding intelligent technology at the customer’s premises.

Once electric cars have become intelligent mobile stores of green electricity, could a fleet of such vehicles replace a conventional power station?

I consider it more a case of using this technology to optimise society’s transition to clean energy. We see time and again how electricity generated from renewable energy sources cannot be fully fed into the grid. This is where we come in, with our electric vehicle batteries. In 2019 alone, 6,500 gigawatt hours went unused in Germany. This could have powered 2.7 million electric vehicles for an entire year.

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