Can Your EV Power Your House? Using an Electric Car as a Home Battery in Australia

Yes, an electric car can power your house in Australia, but in September 2026 it is still an early-adopter project rather than a tick-box option. You need a car whose maker permits it (today that means a Nissan Leaf; Hyundai, Kia and BYD are validating theirs), a bidirectional charger on the Clean Energy Council’s approved list at roughly $4,850 to $10,000 for the unit before installation, and approval from your electricity distributor. Get those three lined up and the prize is real: a 60 kWh car battery holds more than four Tesla Powerwalls, and it is parked at home most of the time. Here is what it takes, how long your car could keep the lights on, and whether the sums beat a home battery.

What does it take to run a house from an EV?

Three pieces, and all three have to agree with each other. First, the car has to be built and permitted for bidirectional discharge. That is a software and warranty question as much as a hardware one: most modern EVs can physically push DC power back out through the charge port, but the carmaker decides whether the car will cooperate and whether the battery warranty survives it. Second, a bidirectional charger with a built-in inverter turns the car’s DC into 230 V AC for your switchboard. In Australia it must sit on the Clean Energy Council’s approved inverter list, which every distributor relies on, under the AS/NZS 4777.2 standard, which was amended to cover V2G in November 2024. Third, your distributor (Ausgrid, SA Power Networks, Energex and so on) has to approve the connection the same way it approves a solar inverter or home battery. SA Power Networks, the first to allow V2G outside trials, treats a bidirectional charger as a battery energy storage system with a 10 kVA-per-phase limit.

Two things people confuse with this. Vehicle-to-load (V2L), the 240 V socket on many Hyundai, Kia, BYD and MG models, runs appliances through a lead. It cannot connect to your house wiring and it is not a home battery. And a home charger that “works with solar”, like the units in our home charger buyer’s guide, only ever pushes energy into the car. Our bidirectional charger guide covers the V2L, V2H and V2G distinctions and the hardware on sale.

How long could your EV run your home?

Your car’s usable battery is about 60 kWh , and its V2H/V2G status here is: not yet supported for most models . The arithmetic is simple: usable kilowatt-hours divided by what your house uses in a day. The AEMC’s representative household uses about 3,900 kWh a year, close to 11 kWh a day, and homes that own an EV skew larger, so we use 15 kWh a day below.

The full per-model status for all 34 cars we track is in our list of V2G and V2H cars in Australia. Three caveats shrink those numbers in practice. You will keep a driving reserve; Hyundai and Kia have said their systems will let owners set a floor between 20 and 100 per cent. The charger caps output, so a 7.4 kW unit like the StarCharge Halo runs a normal house comfortably but not the oven, air-conditioner and pool pump at once. And a blackout on day one is not a blackout on day four if the car has to leave the driveway. Even so, a full EV is a different category of storage from a wall battery: the 13.5 kWh Tesla Powerwall 3 covers under a day of the same home.

EV battery or a home battery: which should a solar household buy?

This is the real question for anyone with panels on the roof, and the honest answer in 2026 is that they are not yet substitutes. Compare them on the four things that matter.

The rebate line is decisive for a lot of households. The Cheaper Home Batteries Program takes roughly 30 per cent off a CEC-approved stationary battery of 5 to 100 kWh installed alongside solar, and its eligibility rules state that portable batteries and electric vehicles are not eligible. A bidirectional charger is not a battery, so it gets nothing. Add installation (Amber Electric, which runs the ARENA-backed V2G program, puts bidirectional charger installs at $2,000 to $4,000) and the two options land in a similar all-in band, with the wall battery discounted and always home, and the car offering four to seven times the storage when it is there.

The availability column is the one to be honest with yourself about. Solar charging works when the car is parked under the panels at midday, which suits people who work from home, retirees and second cars, and is exactly the problem our solar charging guide lays out. If the car commutes, it misses the solar and gets home in time to be the evening battery only if you charged it somewhere cheap first. Origin’s V2G trial asks participants to plug in “most days” for that reason.

What does it actually save?

Run a plain worked example rather than a brochure one. A household uses 15 kWh a day, about 10 kWh of it between late afternoon and bedtime when a flat or peak tariff costs around 30c/kWh. Instead of buying that evening energy from the grid, the car supplies it, having been charged either overnight on an EV plan at about 8c/kWh or from rooftop solar that would otherwise have earned a 5c feed-in tariff. The saving is 10 kWh times the gap: roughly $2.20 a day on overnight charging, $2.50 a day on solar, or $800 to $900 a year. The tariff assumptions are the same ones our cost-to-charge guide uses.

Against $4,850 to $10,000 of hardware plus $2,000 to $4,000 of installation, that is a payback measured in a decade or more, and most people will change cars before it lands. Three things move the needle. Wholesale-exposed plans that pay real money for evening exports can double the value per kWh, which is why Amber sits at the centre of the ARENA-funded programs. Retailer bundles that carry the hardware change the equation entirely: Origin’s trial supplies a BYD Atto 3 and a $6,000 StarCharge Halo charger on subscription with free home charging, and AGL’s trial offers discounted chargers with Hyundai, Kia, BYD and Zeekr as partners. And genuine backup value in outage-prone areas is worth something a spreadsheet does not capture. If none of those describe you, the arithmetic today says a normal home charger on an overnight plan captures most of the saving for a tenth of the cost.

Will it wear out the battery or void the warranty?

Cycling wears lithium batteries, and using the car as a home battery adds cycles. The federal government’s own V2G guidance says plainly that this “may lead to slightly faster battery wear over time”, offset by smart energy management. The research points in two directions depending on how hard you cycle. A University of Hawaii study found that discharging to the grid twice a day, on top of driving, could shorten a pack’s life to under five years (Dubarry et al., 2017). A University of Warwick study modelled shallow, smart discharging and found it could actually reduce capacity fade compared with a car that simply charges up and sits at a high state of charge (Uddin et al., 2017). Scale matters: shifting 10 kWh a night out of an 80 kWh pack is a 12 per cent cycle, and over a year it adds about 3,650 kWh of throughput, the equivalent of another 20,000 km of driving at 18 kWh per 100 km. If it ever does come to a new pack, our guide to EV battery replacement costs has the real Australian numbers.

The warranty is the sharper risk right now, because the carmakers have not finished deciding. Hyundai’s V2G lead told The Driven that some chargers on sale achieve discharge by working around the car’s own software, and that the company had seen cars discharging while their dashboards showed 0 kW, which is why it asked charger makers to remove Hyundai models from their compatibility lists. The Electric Vehicle Council’s position, reported by CarsGuide in August 2026, is that unless the warranty terms say V2G is allowed, it generally is not.

The practical rule: before spending $5,000-plus on a charger, get it in writing from the carmaker, for your exact model, year and software, that discharging through that specific charger is supported. “Tested by the charger company” is not the same thing, and Sigenergy’s own compatibility list says so in its fine print.

Can it keep the lights on in a blackout?

Only if the charger can island. Feeding your house while the grid is down requires the inverter to disconnect from the street and run your circuits on its own, the same anti-islanding rules that apply to a solar battery. Some bidirectional chargers offer a backup mode and some do not, and even those that do usually back up a set of essential circuits rather than the whole house, so ask the installer that exact question before you buy. Where it works, the numbers from the table above apply: a 60 kWh car is several days of fridge, lights, internet and cooking.

If your car is not V2H-capable, V2L is the fallback and it costs nothing. A 3.6 kW outlet runs a fridge, a few lights, phone charging and a kettle through a heavy-duty extension lead, which is more than most homes get in an outage today. Our camping power guide covers what 3.6 kW will and will not run. What it will not do is feed the switchboard: never try to back-feed a house through a powerpoint.

Is it worth doing in 2026, or should you wait?

Do it now if you tick every box: a supported car (a Leaf today, or you are in the Origin, AGL or Amber programs), big solar, a wholesale or retailer V2G plan, a cooperative distributor and real blackout exposure. For that household this is the first year the pieces genuinely connect, and the National Roadmap for Bidirectional EV Charging is now policy rather than aspiration.

Wait if you are everyone else. The carmaker announcements Hyundai and Kia have been promising for the Ioniq and EV9 ranges are the trigger that turns this from a trial into a product, and CarsGuide’s read on the industry is a full-scale launch in 2027. Until then, charge on an overnight plan or your own solar with a normal wallbox, use V2L if you have it, and buy the wall battery with the rebate if you need backup this summer. The car will still be there, still holding four Powerwalls’ worth, when the warranty finally says yes.