Amber Electric has quietly extended its wholesale-price smart charging automation to MG, XPeng, and Audi vehicles, covering a significant slice of Australia’s new EV registrations, while its vehicle-to-grid trial remains stalled with no additional car makers committing beyond the existing pilot partners. The move deepens Amber’s position as the only Australian retailer offering fully automated, real-time wholesale arbitrage for residential EV charging, but the V2G impasse highlights a structural deadlock: OEMs will not enable bidirectional hardware without warranty certainty, and regulators have not mandated the standards that would give them that certainty.
Amber’s wholesale-price model and the mechanics of smart charging in the NEM
Amber Electric operates differently from every other tier-one retailer in the National Electricity Market. Instead of fixed tariffs or time-of-use windows, it passes the five-minute wholesale spot price directly to customers, adding a flat monthly subscription fee and network charges. For EV owners, the value proposition is straightforward: the car charges automatically when the spot price is negative or near-zero – typically midday when rooftop solar floods the grid – and pauses when prices spike during the evening ramp. Amber’s software talks to the vehicle’s telematics API, reads state of charge, and dispatches charge commands without driver intervention.
The three new brands matter because of their market weight. MG, owned by SAIC, has consistently ranked in the top three EV sellers in Australia for two years, moving volume in the sub-$45,000 segment where price-sensitive buyers are most responsive to running-cost savings. XPeng, a newer Chinese entrant, targets the premium tech-oriented buyer with models like the G6 and P7 that already support advanced OTA updates and cloud connectivity – prerequisites for Amber’s API integration. Audi brings the Volkswagen Group’s MEB-platform vehicles (Q4 e-tron, Q8 e-tron) into the fold, representing the established European premium cohort that has historically been slower to open telematics to third parties. Together, these brands likely represent 25-30% of the addressable EV fleet in Australia that supports the necessary API access today.
Smart charging – often labelled V1G to distinguish it from bidirectional V2G – is technically simpler. It requires only a cloud-to-cloud handshake between the retailer’s platform and the OEM’s vehicle API, plus the customer’s consent. No hardware changes, no inverter upgrades, no changes to the car’s battery management system. Amber’s integration with Tesla, BYD, and Hyundai/Kia already demonstrated the model; adding MG, XPeng, and Audi expands the total addressable fleet without changing the underlying architecture. The revenue logic for Amber is also clear: each enrolled EV becomes a controllable load resource that can be bid into the wholesale market as demand response, earning the retailer additional margin while lowering the customer’s effective energy cost.
Why V2G remains frozen while V1G scales
The contrast with V2G is stark. Amber’s V2G trial, launched in partnership with the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) and a handful of distribution networks, has been running for over a year with a single OEM partner – widely understood to be Mitsubishi via its Outlander PHEV and the now-discontinued i-MiEV, both equipped with CHAdeMO ports. CHAdeMO is the only DC bidirectional standard currently certified for V2G in Australia. CCS2, the dominant DC fast-charge standard for every new EV sold in the country, lacks a finalized bidirectional profile in the Australian regulatory framework. The Clean Energy Council and Standards Australia have been working on AS/NZS 4777.2 amendments to accommodate V2G, but the process is iterative and consensus-driven, with no firm publication date.
That points to a deeper coordination failure. OEMs face a three-way warranty trap: if a battery fails after V2G cycling, the manufacturer must determine whether degradation came from driving, calendar aging, or grid export cycles. Without a standardized cycle-counting methodology and a clear liability framework – neither of which exists in Australia – no major OEM will enable V2G in firmware. Volkswagen Group has publicly stated it will not support V2G on MEB platforms until ISO 15118-20 is implemented end-to-end and local grid codes recognize the vehicle as a registered generator. Hyundai and Kia have taken a similar position globally. Chinese OEMs including BYD and SAIC have signaled willingness in China, where the national standard GB/T 34657 mandates V2G capability, but they have not ported that firmware to Australian-delivered vehicles because the regulatory trigger is absent.
By comparison, the UK’s Project Sciurus and the US’s FERC Order 2222 implementation have created clearer pathways: aggregators can register distributed resources, including EVs, as market participants, and OEMs have defined warranty carve-outs for approved V2G programs. Australia has no equivalent. The Australian Energy Market Operator’s (AEMO) Integrated System Plan identifies 20-30 GW of flexible demand needed by 2040, with EVs expected to contribute the largest share. But without V2G, that flexibility is one-way only – load shifting, not injection. The economic value of bidirectional export is estimated at $1,000-$2,000 per vehicle per year in avoided network investment and wholesale arbitrage, based on modelling by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. Multiply that by the 200,000+ EVs already on Australian roads, and the foregone value is on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
Who this affects
- Utility planner: The expanding V1G fleet improves forecastability of daytime minimum demand, but the absence of V2G means evening peak capacity must still be met by generation and storage assets rather than distributed vehicle batteries.
- Storage developer: Behind-the-meter battery business cases weaken as V1G-enabled EVs soak up midday solar for free; V2G would have created a competing distributed storage layer, but its absence leaves a clearer runway for dedicated BESS projects in the 2-4 hour duration window.
- Policy analyst: The stall exposes a regulatory gap – Standards Australia, the Clean Energy Council, and the National Energy Customer Framework all have overlapping but uncoordinated workstreams on V2G; a single mandate aligning ISO 15118-20 adoption with warranty safe harbours would unlock OEM participation.
- Fleet manager: Depot-based fleets with predictable duty cycles (e.g., last-mile delivery, government pools) can already pilot V2G using CHAdeMO-equipped Mitsubishi Outlanders or converted vehicles, but scaling beyond pilot scale requires CCS2 bidirectional support, which is not coming until standards and OEM warranties align.
What to watch next
- Publication of AS/NZS 4777.2 amendment for V2G: The draft is circulating; final gazettal would give networks and OEMs a compliance target date and trigger firmware development cycles.
- AEMO’s DER Register data on V1G enrollment: Quarterly updates will show whether Amber’s expanded brand coverage translates into measurable MW of controllable load – currently estimated at 5-10 MW aggregated across all retailers.
- First CCS2 V2G certification in Australia: Likely to come from a niche OEM (e.g., Polestar, Cupra, or a Chinese brand running a localized pilot) rather than a volume player; that event will force the warranty conversation into the open.
- ARENA funding round for V2G demonstrations: The next round’s guidelines may require ISO 15118-20 compliance as a condition, effectively setting the technical baseline for any future trial.
Bottom line
Amber’s smart charging expansion is a real, revenue-generating step that makes wholesale-price arbitrage accessible to a much larger slice of Australian EV owners today – but it also crystallizes the opportunity cost of the V2G deadlock: every month without a bidirectional standard is a month the grid forgoes gigawatt-hours of distributed storage that the vehicle fleet already physically possesses.
Read the full report at The Driven
Original source: The Driven (Australian EV & zero-carbon transport news)
Note: facts and figures attributed above to The Driven (Australian EV & zero-carbon transport news) reflect that outlet's original reporting. Broader context, cross-sector connections, and forward-looking scenarios reflect independent analysis by our editorial team.
About this article: Drafted by Energy Ai with AI-assisted research and writing based on public reporting, then reviewed under our editorial process before publication.
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