E.ON And Cross-Industry Partners Launch Real-World Pilot To Advance Scalable Bidirectional Charging Across Germany

E.ON, together with a cross-industry consortium representing automotive, grid operations, and research institutions, is advancing the next stage of bidirectional charging through the newly launched pilot phase of the funded BDL Next project. This phase will test, under real-world conditions, the requirements needed to scale the technology and seamlessly integrate electric vehicles into the broader energy market—supporting grid stability while bringing the energy transition directly into households.

By combining interoperability with the integration of photovoltaics, home storage, and intelligent energy management, BDL Next is establishing an open, flexible system that can be deployed across manufacturers and at scale. The pilot began with the handover of vehicles to participating households at BMW Welt in Munich and will run for several months, with its findings helping to shape future regulatory frameworks, including controllability standards, metering concepts, and the incorporation of new forms of flexibility into existing market and grid processes.

As electric mobility accelerates and decentralized generation expands, the energy system’s need for flexibility continues to grow, particularly at the distribution grid level. When intelligently managed, such flexibility becomes a powerful tool for maintaining grid stability. Stefan Padberg, E.ON’s Head of Innovation, emphasized that the project represents a shift from isolated, household-level solutions to fully integrated, system-ready capabilities—solutions that are scalable, measurable, and actively supportive of the grid.

BDL Next focuses on coordinating thousands of small-scale household assets to ease pressure on the wider system by enabling targeted activation and real-time control of electric vehicle flexibility, all without disrupting customers’ everyday routines. This also involves solving the technical challenge of accurately measuring and allocating energy flows, including identifying when electricity is fed back to the grid and verifying whether it originates from renewable sources.

At the same time, the project explores how household-level flexibility can be incorporated into established grid and market mechanisms through standardized communication signals between transmission system operators, distribution system operators, and participating homes. These insights form an essential foundation for Redispatch 3.0—a future framework for congestion management that, for the first time, leverages decentralized resources at the low-voltage level.

Another major focus of the pilot is the intelligent coupling of electric vehicles with residential photovoltaic systems. Through BDL Next, vehicles support self-consumption, participate in vehicle-to-grid (V2G) flexibility markets, and contribute to grid stability simultaneously, turning the electric car into an intelligent hub that links local energy management with the needs of the broader electricity system.

To bring bidirectional charging to the mass market, solutions must be simple for households to use and versatile enough to integrate into many different home and mobility setups. Achieving this requires full interoperability across vehicles, wallboxes, energy management systems, PV installations, and home storage.

BDL Next is therefore designed around open standards and close collaboration between automakers, energy companies, grid operators, and research institutions. Only through shared standards and cross-industry coordination can household flexibility be aggregated at the scale required to meaningfully support the future energy system.BDL Next, a large-scale research and demonstration initiative funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and coordinated by the Research Center for Energy Economics (FfE), began in November 2023 and will run for three years.

The consortium includes BMW, Bayernwerk Netz, TenneT, E.ON, and technology partners such as KEO and Compleo, alongside academic contributors including the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, the University of Passau, and the EBZ Business School. Together, these partners are working to transform bidirectional charging into a practical, scalable solution capable of shaping a more flexible, resilient, and customer-centric energy future.