Ovo trial lets customers power homes with an electric car – but will it cut energy bills?

Electric car owners may be able to save hundreds of pounds on energy bills with a new Ovo Energy trial – but only if they manage to get a rare expensive charger fitted first.

The Ovo trial, which launches today, exploits the fact that electric cars are essentially just a giant battery on wheels. 

The idea is that if you charge up your car using cheap off-peak energy you can make money from that in two ways: using that electricity at peak times to power your home, and selling it to the National Grid for profit. 

But the question of who pays for the £6,000 chargers required for the scheme to work – Ovo or the customer – could see any energy bill savings wiped out for years.

Limited: The trial is only open to drivers with Volkswagen electric vehicles – for now

Ovo ran a limited trial of the scheme from 2020 until 2022, and some users managed to save up to £800 a year on energy bills. 

But drivers will have to get a special charger fitted to their home before they can save money on energy bills, and this time they might have to pay for this themselves.

Normal electric car chargers let power flow one way, into a vehicle. Getting power back out of an electric car batter requires a ‘bi-directional’ charger.

These chargers are almost impossible to find, and most UK homes with them got them fitted for free by companies testing the technology out – as Ovo did in 2020-2022.

But Ovo is tight-lipped about whether it will pay for the special chargers to be fitted this time or expect consumers to pay instead. The energy firm said any energy savings would not come until much later this year and it ‘won’t share final details of this’ at the moment. 

Electric car expert Ginny Buckley, of the website Electrifying, said as a general rule ‘consumers aren’t able to buy bi-directional chargers yet’. This Is Money did manage to find one firm selling bi-directional chargers, but these cost £5,990.

The company, Voltacon, based in Coventry, said its Quasar charger is ‘the world’s first bidirectional home charger’. 

If trial participants do have to pay for this special charger it could take years for them to see any energy bill benefits, unless they are lucky enough to have already got one fitted to their home. 

The scheme is currently only open to Ovo customers who own Volkswagen electric cars, but the energy firm hopes to expand it to owners of other car firms in the future.

Ovo’s ‘vehicle-to-everything’ power trial, called Inflexion, is being carried out with energy software firm Kaluza.

The Government is also putting £16 million of funding into this technology.

Energy and Climate Minister Graham Stuart said: ‘We want to make smart charging an easier choice for drivers of electric vehicles, whether that is charging on the driveway, at the workplace, or parked on the street. To do that we need to build new network infrastructure at pace, using the latest available technologies.’

Alex Thwaites, head of zero carbon living at Ovo Energy, said: ‘This is not just about driving renewable energy solutions forward, it’s about demonstrating how customers can actually reduce their energy bills by making the switch to an electric vehicle.’

Customers can register their interest in the trial by visiting the Ovo website.  

If it can be made affordable for customers, this sort of scheme could be a big part of the future of electric car ownership in the UK. 

Buckley said: ‘We see it becoming a big part of managing demand on the UK grid as more of us make the switch to electric cars and we move to renewable energy generation.’

This post first appeared on Dailymail.co.uk