It’s an unseasonably cold morning in late May in Arrowtown as Josh Ellison and I shiver outside the community centre, watching nothing happen.
The focus of our attention is a sleek green electric car from Chinese firm Zeekr and the cable snaking from its charge port to a specialised charger mounted to the wall of the community centre.
I feel a pang of guilt for having made Ellison, the research and development lead at electrification advocacy group Rewiring Aotearoa, drive me out here to watch him plug in a car. But the feeling evaporates as Ellison shows me the dashboard on his phone. The Zeekr isn’t charging up – it’s discharging into the community centre.
“We only have one line that comes into Queenstown and it’s at very high risk of being knocked down in an earthquake event. And we have a very high chance of an earthquake event. There’s a lot of research on the Alpine Fault line that goes through here and estimates are something like 75 percent the next 50 years,” Ellison says.
If a magnitude 8 Alpine Fault earthquake hit on a frigid morning like today, the combination of car and charger would allow the community centre – which doubles as Arrowtown’s civil defence centre – to keep the lights on.
People could come to charge their phones, get a hot cuppa, warm up under the heat pump. Combined with home solar to keep the cars charged and the region could limp on for far longer than otherwise.
“We have very, very few batteries at the moment and households are buying batteries quite fast, especially now with the fuel crisis, but this would provide a huge extra layer of battery storage and energy resilience that we wouldn’t otherwise have, because the volume of storage in cars is so high,” Ellison explains.
Watching nothing happen is pretty exciting after all.
Resilience and affordability
The charger at the community centre and the Zeekr car are part of a trial run by the Queenstown Electrification Accelerator, a community-led initiative co-led by Ellison and backed by Rewiring, Destination Queenstown, the local council, the Central Lakes Trust and the recently shuttered Ara Ake energy innovation centre.
That is to say, this technology is not widespread in New Zealand right now.
There are probably fewer than 100 two-way chargers installed across the country, increasingly in trials like Queenstown’s. Those who have had one privately installed, says Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (Eeca) chief executive Marcos Pelenur, are the “sharp end of early adopters”.
At the same time, however, harnessing the battery power of New Zealand’s growing electric vehicle fleet is no distant pipe dream.
The majority of the nearly 100,000 EVs on the road today have at least some two-way charging functionality. An increasing number of EVs sold new in New Zealand come with the capability ready to enable – though most automakers haven’t yet flicked that switch.
By 2030, adoption of two-way charging might look something like EV or solar adoption rates today. You might not have it, but you almost certainly know someone who does.
The benefits, Pelenur says, could be massive.
Resilience is obvious. Forget diesel generators for keeping the lights on in a blackout. Batteries are cleaner and quieter, can be recharged without bringing in fuel (all you have to do is point a sheet of glass at the sun) and literally come on wheels.
“Another one is just immediate saving money for households. By being able to have another power source, like stored energy in a battery, houses will be able to better manage their energy use to save themselves money,” he says. “If you have the battery in the car, we should unlock it.”
The energy system as a whole could benefit too. By 2050, a Concept Consulting paper found last year, New Zealand’s EV batteries could store nearly twice as much power as the country uses in a day.
If those cars all plug in and charge up at 6pm every night, peak demand per household could jump by 30 percent. But if they were instead charged at other times and then discharged their energy during peaks to reduce household consumption, household net energy use at those times could go negative.
In other words, households could not only eliminate their own usage from the national peak, but supply power back to the grid to help their neighbours too.
Pelenur points to an analysis by Eeca from January which found some two gigawatts of peak demand could be shifted away from peaks by 2040, with electric vehicles making up a significant chunk of that. Doing so would save Transpower from spending some $3 billion on new poles and wires which would otherwise be needed at peak.
NZ is falling behind
How do we actually get from where we are now to that future, where households are power players, not just consumers, and our moving batteries keep the lights on when needed and save us hundreds of dollars on our power bills?
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V2L, V2H, V2G? What does two-way charging really mean? These days, plenty of electric vehicles are sold with so-called vehicle-to-load (or V2L if you like ugly acronyms). Those cars either have plugs in the cabin or can be paired with adapters that charge into the charge port which you can connect to a regular three-pin plug. Already, these plugs have unlocked a lot of resilience and additional benefits. “In something like Cyclone Gabrielle, we saw a lot of vehicle-to-load. That’s when we had BYD Atto 3’s powering water pumps and powering modems, and people could plug in to their cars and take energy out of their cars,” says Drive Electric chief executive Kirsten Corson. “That’s around now, and that’s also why tradies have been buying the EV utes, because they can plug in their power tool in the back of their ute and not need a generator.” Those plugs are, however, limited. You can’t run a whole house off a single three-pin plug. So we look to the next level, vehicle-to-home (V2H). This uses a bespoke charger to take power from the car at a much higher rate. The charger is hardwired into your switchboard, so the home (or business) uses the power as if it was coming from the grid – decreasing the need to actually take grid power and therefore helping to reduce peaks. One step further is vehicle-to-grid (V2G). Relatively little needs to change to turn a vehicle-to-home setup into a vehicle-to-grid one. If you’ve already got solar or a battery and can export power to the grid, this works just like that. It takes more power from the car than your house alone needs and feeds the excess to the rest of the energy system. “Vehicle-to-grid and vehicle-to-home and vehicle-to-load are all very energy nerd terms,” Ellison, from Rewiring, concedes. So let’s call it two-way charging. In particular, we’re looking at the top two levels of the pyramid – where the full power of the car’s battery is unlocked in a way which isn’t really happening in New Zealand yet. |
It’s not a case of needing more time in the lab. This stuff works already, Ellison says – as seen in the Queenstown trial. In fact, the trial isn’t directed at testing the technology at all.
“There’s lots of trials around the world where vehicle-to-grid is tested and works. Ultimately, it’s a big battery. We know that part,” he says.
“We’re trying to leapfrog a little bit to help New Zealand catch up and be able to look more at the behavioral side. What are the models, both residentially and on the business side, that people are going to use this for?”
On this, too, there’s helpful evidence from overseas.
In the United Kingdom, energy retailer Octopus will install a two-way charger at customers’ homes and offers special rates in exchange for using their cars as batteries. It even offers a bundle which includes a leased EV.
“You’ll need to be able to plug in for 12 hours a day, 20 days per month and charge less than 210kWh per month (equivalent to 625 miles [1000 km] of driving),” the firm’s promotional material reads. Customers can set a minimum state of charge and detail their schedules, so their cars are still charged up for their commutes or other uses.
In Finland, one firm has launched an EV “virtual power plant”, which uses EVs plugged into two-way chargers to sell power on the wholesale market. In France, automaker Renault has enabled two-way charging on its electric vehicles – a functionality which expanded to the Netherlands in May.
Other countries are still in the trial stage, but outpacing New Zealand. China had 30 pilot projects in place across nine cities last year and aims to install 5000 two-way chargers by the end of next year. Across the Tasman, government and industry have teamed up to launch a roadmap outlining the path to widespread two-way charging.
Warranty woes
What is stopping us?
Everyone agrees the barriers fall under two umbrellas: One on regulation and standards and one dealing with markets and commercialisation.
What they disagree on is which barrier is the biggest.
“One of the largest barriers to vehicle-to-grid today is the automakers not necessarily approving it,” says Ellison.
“We’ve got a big battery in the car. To be able to communicate [with] that battery on the charging standard, the car doesn’t necessarily need to know it’s doing vehicle-to-grid. The charging standard is built in a way that it can do it without the car knowing. So there’s a dilemma there, which is that car companies could consider it as degrading the battery and voiding the warranty.”
Two-way chargers, working on charging standards approved in New Zealand today, are already available for purchase. Companies like the Chinese firm SigEnergy have tested their equipment on a vast array of models and say it is compatible with most EVs in the country, but Ellison notes that’s different from the EV makers themselves agreeing.
For the Queenstown trial, the electrification accelerator has secured exemptions from a dealership and from BYD so they can use two-way charging without voiding a warranty.
That SigEnergy and competitor StarCharge are able to legally sell their chargers in New Zealand highlights one of the difficulties: There is no hard barrier to two-way charging, just soft ones.
“There’s often actually a lot of myths about, ‘You’re not allowed to do this, the networks don’t approve it, or the regulations don’t approve it,’ but that’s not the case. So people just plug in their cars and see if it works, and I really want to emphasise there is significant risk to that. It’s not a zero risk thing to do, right?” Ellison says.
“The dilemma is ultimately, if the car doesn’t know it’s doing it, then there’s a risk due to how the car’s safety mechanisms were built. Can they handle when it’s doing it if something goes wrong?”
Given the car companies have been slow to approve two-way charging, even as they increasingly build the functionality into their vehicles, Ellison believes the Government needs to step in.
Specifically, he envisages a role for Eeca to test combinations of cars and chargers and give the tick of approval.
“Because it’s possible to do today and the car companies haven’t moved fast enough, that’s where there needs to be independent testing done on behalf of the people. Because of the state we’re in, where people can do that now with off-the-shelf products, it’s a case where government should go, we’ll do this testing.”
(In the absence of that, as a general rule, Ellison suggests that if your car company hasn’t said you can two-way charge, don’t do it.)
Seven-year delay
Over at Eeca, however, Pelenur has his sights set on a different barrier. He agrees the warranty issues are a problem, but “that will get resolved with a bit of time as these car companies become more comfortable”.
He points out that a two-way charger might run at between seven and 25 kilowatts, whereas a car like the BYD Atto 3 generates 150 kW or more at peak acceleration. “We think the batteries can cope with it, but we want to work with [automakers] for them to be reassured in order to extend the warranties [to cover two-way charging].”
However, another key problem is standards. Standards are a large part of Eeca’s raison d’être. The authority ensures that appliances sold here won’t electrocute you when you plug them in, that they’ll do what they say on the tin, that they won’t unnecessarily use large amounts of power because they were cheaper to build that way for the manufacturer (who doesn’t have to pay your power bill).
A range of standards updates are needed to truly unlock two-way charging, Pelenur says. That includes standards for the bidirectional charging itself, but also the smart charging components that will allow retailers and lines companies and Transpower – and consumers – to best time the charging and discharging of EV batteries.
In May, Energy Minister Simeon Brown announced smart charging functionality would be required in new chargers – but implementing that rule requires a change to standards. Right now, that means issuing new regulations.
“In order for us to create any kind of updated standard, we need to amend the regulations, which requires an Order in Council process, which requires [the Parliamentary Counsel Office] to do drafting. What that has meant is that it’s taken, in some cases, seven years – after Cabinet has made a decision – to update a standard,” Pelenur says.
“We get lapped by Australia. That is, in my opinion, absolutely not fit for purpose.”
Cabinet has agreed to change this system, transitioning from regulation-based standards to a rules-based approach like the Electricity Authority and Commerce Commission. But that requires actual legislation and competes with the vast array of other bills the Government wants to pass before the election.
“It’s very unsexy legislation,” Pelenur concedes, “but, hand on heart, I think it is the thing that will make one of the biggest differences for us in New Zealand. If you’re talking about standards for solar inverters, if you’re talking about balcony solar, batteries, V2G chargers, with a wait time of three to eight years, we cannot progress at any speed on that.”
Coordinated action
This is a complicated space and there are a lot of players working in it.
The car makers, the charger makers, lines companies and Transpower with their own interests, power retailers whose offerings will determine if any of this is even commercial, Eeca working on standards, the Electricity Authority on regulations, not to mention all the consumers trying to understand it all.
For Drive Electric’s CEO Kirsten Corson, this is the first barrier to address. New Zealand needs a coordinated roadmap, she believes, with roles outlined for every player.
In Australia, she says, the sector went from the starting point to the beginning of a two-way charging rollout in just 18 months with the help of a roadmap.
“There’s a lot of moving parts. It’s a systems issue,” she says. In particular, New Zealand’s 29 lines companies (compared to Australia’s nine and the UK’s six) mean just one dragging their feet can slow the whole pack down. “In reality we have to focus on best practice and what is going to advance the market, not try and design a system for the lowest common denominator.”
Alongside standards and warranties, Corson says work is needed to ensure the financial value of two-way charging is actually on offer for consumers. If retailers and lines companies try to hoard the savings for themselves, then consumers just won’t adopt the technology.
“We have to allow them to earn revenue from both charging and discharging,” she says.
“How are businesses and consumers going to make money out of this? Allowing [price] signals to be enough to encourage them to invest, that’s a really critical step. I’m hopeful. I see the market coming together to make that happen.”
Last year, Concept Consulting found two-way charging could save consumers $2100 a year from lower power bills and deferred investment in new poles and wires as peak power use is shifted. But the trick is ensuring the market is structured so consumers actually see those returns.
Simply charging different rates for on- and off-peak power usage won’t cut it, Concept found. Indeed, that could even lead to unintended consequences, creating a new peak at (say) 9pm when off-peak rates turn on and everyone’s cars start charging.
If just 3 percent of households used two-way charging in direct response to time-of-use plans, it would create a secondary peak 25 percent higher than the current evening peak.
“This clearly illustrates that current (and soon-to-be-introduced) mass market network tariff settings will not be durable as smart bidirectional charging matures,” the consultancy wrote.
Instead, it suggested “type-of-use” rates, similar to controlled hot water rates, for two-way charging, home batteries and other forms of dispatchable energy supply.
“A consistent nationwide approach to type of use charging, designed to support contestability and to maximise residual controllability, would be the best way to spur V2G uptake,” Concept recommended.
A battery with a free car
Back in Queenstown, the two-way charging trial is truly getting underway. In May, Eeca announced plans to expand the trial to other major cities, installing 100 new two-way chargers and potentially trialling five two-way chargers for electric trucks as well.
It is still early days and interim findings aren’t expected until closer to the end of the year. Already, however, lessons are being learned.
“There’s lots of unexpected technical things, which with new technology is always going to be the case. New installs means that everyone in the process, from electricians to inspectors, this is new to everyone. While the technology is kind of a combination of a solar inverter and a charger, which you can both install separately today, the combined nature of it does create a bit of confusion,” he says.
It’s a classic example of why demonstration projects are really important and valuable, because you learn those things and bring people along, so that when the technology is ready we can go a lot faster as a country than if it became ready, and we were kind of stuck in that early stage where people didn’t know how it worked.”
Pelenur says Eeca has been working with Master Electricians, on the sidelines of the trial, to develop guidelines for two-way charger installs.
“We need to de-risk the newness of the technology for wider adoption. We’re in that space around testing, demonstrating, de-risking, and we think then the benefits will be self-evident and we’ll be able to step away.”
Ellison agrees – two-way charging is a no-brainer. Battery uptake is already spiking and nearly 18,000 households have now installed batteries with their solar panels, doubling in just 17 months.
EVs, however, outnumber household batteries five to one. Uptake is picking up as the fuel crisis bites.
“When you buy a household battery, like a Tesla Powerwall, it might be $1000 per kilowatt-hour of storage that you get. When you look at some of the cars on sale now, the BYD Atto 3 right now is around $50,000 and comes with a 60 kilowatt-hour battery,” Ellison says.
“You’re getting a battery for less than $1000/kWh and it comes with a free car. Or really, what is more realistic is that people are buying a car for car reasons. They need a car. And it’s coming with a battery that can then give them all these other financial benefits, like lowering their bills.”
Some interviews for this article were undertaken during the Electrify Queenstown 2026 conference. Destination Queenstown covered the cost of flights to attend and cover the conference.
