Vehicle to Grid (V2G) and Vehicle to Home (V2H) is coming to strata apartment buildings

The Australian federal government has said that the first V2G EV chargepoints will be certified by Christmas 2024. Chris Bowen announced this at the Sydney International EV show in November 2024.
What does this mean for residential strata buildings?

​Vehicle-to-grid or vehicle to home will be able to be setup within some modern residential strata buildings straight away, once the new V2G chargepoints are certified.

For those strata buildings which don't have a 'service protection device' or SPD on the main switchboard, it would be advisable to put a plan in place to get one of these SPD's installed as an Owners Corporation project, prior to V2G or V2H being implemented for individual lots.

The challenge, similar to large amounts of solar feeding into the grid from a rooftop solar system, is that V2G may create danger for the employees of grid providers, when working on sections of the grid during a planned or unplanned outage. Strata buildings will need to be able to 'isolate' their building from the grid in the future. Many of our older strata buildings are just continually connected to the electricity grid, without the ability to shut off power coming in or out of the building.

V2H being available within a strata building would change the calculus on the next car purchase being an EV, rather than an internal combustion engine, for many apartment dwellers. Some strata owners (in particular townhouse owners) have gone and installed dedicated standalone batteries for their own townhouse, sometimes spending up to $18,000 to get a 13.3kWh battery installed in their courtyard.

If V2H was available, it would be much more cost-effective for a car owner to upgrade from an ICE vehicle to an EV, rather than installing a standalone battery for their own apartment. With some electric vehicles now available for $41,000 with a 51kWh battery, you will get much better bang for the buck buying an EV, with a bigger battery at a lower cost per kWh, than buying a standalone household battery.

In areas like The Shire and Blacktown in Sydney where there is a high proliferation of solar for stratas which are duplexes, townhouses, villas it would make sense to capture excess solar from your individual solar system and store this in your electric vehicle during the day. You could then discharge this free solar back into your apartment after the sun goes down to avoid paying for the most expensive electricity during peak hours.

We have already seen some early adopter strata schemes such as Wharf Terraces (Woolloomooloo) install a dedicated solar + battery system for the primary purpose of reducing the cost of charging electric vehicles.

For individual lot owners who want to be V2G or V2H ready, you should make sure that you make the leap to a smart meter now, if you still have an ageing accumulation (analogue) electricity meter. You will necessarily need a smart meter for your own individual apartment to be able to participate in the V2G/V2H revolution. Also, you may want to upgrade the RCD's in your apartment sub board to be 'Type A' RCD's which is the latest standard. Most apartment dwellers don't have the most modern RCD's on their apartment sub-boards. Some older apartment dwellers still have ceramic fuses, which will also need to go as a prerequisite to become V2G/V2H ready.

We will wait to see which EV manufacturers are ready to 'turn on' V2G/V2H. We already have cars in Australia which are Vehicle-to-Load (V2L) ready. There are adaptors which are available to turn V2L vehicles into V2G/V2H vehicles.

The cheapest way to setup V2G/V2H will be to buy a car which has an onboard inverter (Kia EV9?) which can output AC power after converting it from DC power stored in the EV's battery. If you get an EV with an onboard inverter, it will require a less expensive EV chargepoint, to to enable V2G/V2H. Otherwise, you will need to buy an EV chargepoint which has an onboard inverter and the early versions of these chargepoints were expensive at $10,000 each. If the car can invert the power to AC and then output it, then you may only need a $2,000 chargepoint to become V2G/V2H ready.

​At Wattblock, we have been waiting for this type of development to occur as part of the electrification of strata buildings since 2021. Here is a short video called "Virtual Power Plants and Strata Apartment buildings" which we put together 3 years ago. It is great to see this next piece of the puzzle coming together to assist in Electrifying Strata.