Home Battery Storage (ESS) vs. Vehicle-to-Home (V2H)⚡2025
Posted 9 Apr
Posted 9 Apr
In the world of energy storage, there seems to be new technology and products hitting the Australian market, designed to enable home and business owners to store their excess solar energy and power their home independent of the grid.
With the recent announcements of vehicle-to-home (V2H) technology, the main question that we get asked is that when vehicle-to-home is available, will traditional solar battery storage become redundant? Here’s why we think there will be room for both.
Courtesy of Kia & Wallbox.
If you haven’t already heard of V2H, it essentially allows for bidirectional charging from your electric vehicle battery to power home appliances in addition to normal charging.
With the ability to store excess solar energy in electric vehicles, and power your home later with that energy, wouldn’t that make dedicated home battery storage useless? Not necessarily.
Battery storage will still play a part in helping homes and businesses maximise solar production and contributing to grid stability.
The nature of a home battery is designed to be available and charge and discharge whenever required. Unlike electric vehicles which may be out cruising, solar batteries are always available to store any excess solar energy that you produce.
Because of the ability to analyse your usage through software like Amber, an ESS can learn your consumption and adjust its charging and discharging periods based on when you most need it. They can also take full advantage of off-peak periods to be used instead of on-peak periods.
This will greatly depend on how your lifestyle is and when your electric vehicle would be available to act as energy storage.
Courtesy of Hyundai Motor Group on Pexels.
Electric vehicles are currently designed to use their energy to transport passengers, not necessarily to power a home, especially for long-periods.
Using your electric vehicle in a vehicle-to-home setting could put additional ‘milage’ on your battery’s overall lifespan.
Even with significantly more energy capacity in some EVs compared to home batteries, combining driving usage with home power purposes could degrade your battery much quicker than expected and shorten its lifetime.
Because we are in vehicle-to-grid’s infancy, it is hard to give exact pricing as there aren’t really any products readily available as of this article.
What we do know is that for around $13,000* you can get a home battery that has around 14kWh of energy storage which is sufficient for homes and their energy usage.
On the other hand, assuming you already have an electric vehicle, the only V2H charger which is no longer available was the Wallbox Quasar which came in around $10,000*. Wallbox Quasar is yet to be released in Australia.
There are also currently no ways to earn money with your electric vehicle battery as this technology is still in testing. Home solar battery storage can be paired with Amber to enable you to earn money, not just save it.
*Prices do not include additional hardware or installation.
Courtesy of Wallbox
Deciding on whether you should invest in a dedicated battery unit for your home or wait for vehicle-to-grid to use your electric vehicle battery will vary depending on the person, goals, requirements, budget, and well, determination.
With the news of V2G ability only being recently announced, it will still be a bit of time before things like V2H-capable EVs and chargers are available, as well as additional elements like VPP support and general customer awareness.
Whether you get V2H at the end of 2025, or in the next few years, battery storage will still benefit you in both the short and long-term.
Unfortunately, other than choosing the electric vehicle itself, you don’t get a lot of choice in terms of expandability, and customisation to meet your requirements. With such a large battery capacity, your solar system may not be able to charge it as much from solar as you’d like, this means that you’d still have to charge from the grid even if it was off-peak.
As home battery storage models are well-established, they offer better choices and modularity to expand where needed like the ability to add incremental upgrades to battery stacks to save you money initially and expand later.
Obviously, these sorts of scenarios will greatly depend on a lot of variables including what size your solar system is (if you have one), the EVs total energy capacity, your goals, and when the EV will be available to be connected.
Instead of a ‘this or that’ approach, these 2 energy storage methods should enable even greater benefits to the customer when combined. Dedicated home energy storage would allow for your more-traditional solar maximisation, and your EV would act as an extended source of energy when needed.
If you’re at work all day and your primary source of refuelling is at home, you’d be recharging during peak periods where solar is unavailable. This could be combined with stored energy in the dedicated battery and charged with off-peak power when available.
This would also render the vehicle-to-home strategy useless as you’re not powering your home with cheap energy anyways.
If you think your EV will be available throughout the day, you can charge your EV with solar energy, completely offsetting the costs of recharging.
This kind of user would primarily charge their EV overnight using off-peak grid energy and really only be used to get to and from work.
Vehicle-to-home would probably not suit this lifestyle, whereas a battery with solar generation would automatically store excess solar for when you get home, reducing your grid reliance.
If you’re usually working from home all or most of the day, a V2H and dedicated battery combination would allow you to stay flexible in driving availability, whilst also maximise solar when available.
This would depend on the consistency of your whereabouts during the week.
A microgrid is a localised solar and battery system that works independently to the grid.
A vehicle-to-home-enabled EV and charger setup could assist this kind of system to be a mobile form of energy storage. For an example, if there was an extended blackout, you could drive to the nearest suburb with public charging, drive home and continue to power your house and repeat until grid power is restored.
Even though microgrid systems would be self-reliant, an electric vehicle would be a great addition to help you increase the benefits of your excess solar.
Depending on the model, brand, and year, electric vehicles consist of various battery technologies from Lithium Nickel Manganese Cobalt
Oxide (NMC) to Lithium-Iron-Phosphate (LFP) which is also found in home energy storage.
NMC battery technology is used for electric vehicles because of its higher energy density which is great for range and acceleration.
LFP battery technology is a better choice for energy storage due to its safer battery technology and its ability to last many more cycles, which is more important for charging and discharging lifespan needed for homes.
So generally, for extended charging and discharging periods, an electric vehicle with an LFP battery will generally be better for V2H
purposes, where NMC EVs are more suitable for high and short burst of energy, usually seen as a backup source of energy during blackouts.
Overall, both ESS and electric vehicle batteries via V2H serve a purpose in providing homes with electricity to either reduce bills or supply the home with power during outages. In combination, these will allow homes to become even more independent and sustainable in a world transitioning to a renewable future.
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. Quasar Wallbox (I) is no longer available.
The new version (II) is also not yet available AFAIK, but is rumored to be about half the price of the original.
. As for lifespan, there is some evidence that frequent charging & discharging (e.g stop go traffic) actually improves the lifespan in some cases.
. There are other potential clean energy developments that may well make solar completely redundant.
. "Whilst a solar and battery microgrid system wouldn’t be reliant on an electric vehicle battery, it could be a great addition to better help you store anymore excess solar energy. " (anymore should be any/more?)
. Homes generally use at most around 10 kW (NOT kWh), while an EV battery is designed to supply many times this, implying that an EV battery system would "see" a home as a very light load, especially when DC coupled, thus bypassing the onboard inverter. I.e. with a DC connection to the home hybrid inverter. This arrangement also has the advantage that the EV isn't directly connected to the grid, thus bypassing the need to duplicate the grid compatibility issues that are already handled by the inverter. This eliminates the need for a charger altogether, as the capability is built into the solar inverter. Hybrid solar inverters already have the ability to work with battery backup, so it shouldn't be too difficult to modify that functionality to work with an EV battery instead.
. The price of fixed storage is considerably higher per kWh than that of EV batteries, in as much as with an EV you basically get the car thrown in for nothing.
. There will still be room for fixed backup storage in some cases, but not as much as your article implies.