A lithium-crystal sauna in a former industrial Wasteland
The Crystal Sauna stands in Ursviken’s Wasteland, a former industrial site now owned by Skellefteå municipality. It opened as part of Society EXPO 2026 and is bookable by the public. The exterior is pink, mirrored and shaped like a lithium crystal — 280 prisms clad in titanium-coated pink panels, more than 140 laser-cut metal plates and over 3,500 screws went into its construction. Inside, wood and a hand-forged sauna stove connect the lithium shape to humanity’s first use of fire, the designers say.
Energy provider Skellefteå Kraft calls the project “Vehicle-to-Sauna.” electrive reports that the installation can draw electricity from electric vehicle batteries and from stationary storage, and the initiators call it the world’s first battery-powered sauna.
What vehicle-to-X actually means
Bidirectional charging reverses the usual flow. Instead of AC or DC going into the battery, the car’s traction battery can supply power to a building (Vehicle-to-Home, V2H) or feed it into the grid (Vehicle-to-Grid, V2G). The electric car becomes mobile storage: millions of EV batteries could absorb surplus wind and solar power and return it when demand is high.
There is already a commercial promise. BMW and E.ON say owners of a compatible iX3 can earn up to €720 per year from V2G. But the Swedish sauna does not solve the underlying problems: fragmented standards, poor interoperability and — in Germany particularly — a slow rollout of smart meters. It is a demonstration, not a mass-market product.
Why the maths matters before you get excited
A 60 kWh battery charged at home at €0.30 per kWh costs €18. If an owner can sell 30 kWh back to the grid at €0.20 per kWh during peak windows, that is €6 per event. You would need roughly 120 such events a year to approach the €720 headline — and that assumes your car, wallbox, energy contract and grid operator all support the flow. Our charging cost calculator is the right place to model the charging side before factoring in any V2G income.
Meanwhile, our supercharger database tracks 483 locations across Europe. That number is measurable public infrastructure. Bidirectional-capable public points are nowhere near that scale, and most EV drivers still cannot use their car as a home battery today.
What this project does — and does not — change
The pink sauna gets attention, and that has value. It shows a traction battery doing useful work while parked, in a setting people will visit and talk about. But it does not fix the regulatory and technical gaps. For contrast, high-power charging is moving quickly: the Tesla Semi’s 1.2 MW charging shows how much power infrastructure can now push into a vehicle; Walmart’s 400 kW fast chargers show the same on the retail side. Pulling power back out is a different challenge.
Larger charging networks are also becoming data-driven. Hubject’s 1.1 million charge points now feed planning tools, but the share of bidirectional charge points in that dataset remains a thin slice. The Scandinavian demo is useful precisely because it makes V2G tangible without pretending the hard part is done.
Practical takeaway
If you drive an EV today, do not buy a car because of a future V2G payback. Check the vehicle’s current specs in our EV catalog, run your real charging costs through the charging cost calculator, and treat bidirectional charging as a bonus that may or may not arrive for your model. For anyone near Skellefteå, the sauna is bookable — but the technology lesson travels further than the heat.
Source: https://www.electrive.com/2026/08/24/pink-hot-electric-bidirectional-charging-for-the-sauna/
