Amber's Senior Product Manager, Nicholas Wodzinski, spoke at the "EVs everywhere" session at Shape Shifters in Melbourne this week, a half-day event run by The Energy on how demand for electricity is changing. The session looked at EV growth and its impact on the grid, with a live Q&A from key industry leaders in the room. We wanted to share some of the insights with you too.
Q. I'm interested in the interaction between EVs and home batteries where households have both. What impact does this have on the charging experience?
NW: The key structural difference is that the EV is a transport asset first, so mobility needs act as hard constraints. A Ready By target (80% by 8am, for example) must be satisfied before any energy arbitrage logic applies, whereas a home battery has no equivalent constraint and can be optimised purely for the home. Once that hard constraint is met, there are secondary considerations like solar routing: whether excess solar goes to the battery to cover the evening peak, or to the car to progress EV charging. We're building that coordination logic into SmartShift to cater for the different preferences of customers and the scenarios they may be in.
Q. Beyond wholesale, can Amber access trial network tariffs, and would this change optimal charging strategy?
NW: Yes. We pass through the applicable DNSP tariff alongside wholesale, and we're actively working with networks around the NEM on trial tariffs, including time-windowed network fee discounts. These change the optimal charging window, which is precisely the point: they align customer incentives with network conditions. If you're a DNSP considering trial tariffs, we'd like to hear from you.
More info on the work Amber is doing on two-way tariffs is outlined here.
Q. Should the wholesale price reflect the carbon content of power?
NW: Roughly, it already does. Abundant supply periods are cheap and renewable-heavy, so price and carbon intensity are correlated most of the time in practice.
Q. How does Amber achieve trust and simple offers for CER access?
NW: Amber is built around two mechanisms. First, incentive alignment: passing through the wholesale price means the market's signal, cheap when abundant, which is when it's renewable, becomes the customer's signal too.
Second, automation. SmartShift combines wholesale price forecasts, weather and a learned profile of the home's load to coordinate solar, batteries and EVs, with more asset types (hot water, HVAC, pool pumps) plausible in future. The customer has override control throughout.
What that means is that while the way Amber works under the hood can be a little complicated, customers don't need to understand or engage with that complexity to get value from their home setup.
Q. Sceptical consumer: won't the cost and effort involved in setting up clever EV charging just boost retailer profit without benefit to me?
NW: In a traditional retail model, plausibly yes. A retailer with a margin on usage and volume has incentives that can diverge from yours when it's controlling your assets. Amber's model removes that misalignment. How much energy you use, and when, doesn't change what Amber earns, since we pass through wholesale and charge a flat subscription. The broader point is that retail models can be designed so customer value and retailer value aren't mutually exclusive, and Amber is proof of how innovation like this can challenge assumptions of that kind.
More info on how Amber's wholesale price passthrough works here.
Q. Has Amber looked at operating or partnering with EV fast charging stations with variable pricing?
NW: Somewhere between 80 and 90% of EV charging happens at home, and as an energy retailer that's predominantly been our focus to date for EVs. Public charging, both journey charging and destination charging, is a necessary part of the transition and deserves investment, but it hasn't been the charging segment we've invested in to date.
Q. How do we get cheap daytime charging where cars are parked (street, office, train)? Isn't this a necessity for evening discharge confidence?
NW: Charging away from home could help here, but it's not a necessity for most people. Around 80 to 90% of charging is at home.
Charging at work and discharging at home treats the car as an energy carrier. Even a household that's never home on weekdays can capture solar-to-vehicle value on weekends, carrying a charge picked up when solar generation is high during the day back home for self-consumption. For households genuinely absent all day, a home battery is often the better-fitted asset, since it's home when the solar is. Bidirectional EV charging may make sense for some households and not others.
Q. What are the realistic options for street charging, and could these customers have managed charging?
NW: I think the main variable here is dwell time. At fast-charging sites, load management already exists but serves connection-level and customer-experience purposes: you want dynamic allocation of switchboard headroom (500kW across 8 plugs, say) rather than fixed 60kW caps per head, which products like Kempower's satellite architecture handle well. If you arrive as the only EV across 8 plugs, you want to be able to pull around 200kW, or whatever the max your car can take, not be limited to 60kW.
Grid-oriented managed charging becomes viable where dwell times are long, such as hotels or long-stay parking. Here, charging can be shifted out of the evening peak into optimal overnight windows via OCPP load profiles and local dynamic operating envelopes, but from the driver's side it's simple: if you plug your EV in at a hotel overnight, you don't really care whether it charges during the evening peak, only that you've got a high charge the next day when you need the car in the morning.
Thanks to The Energy for having us and for putting on a great event. If you've got questions of your own about EV charging with Amber, head to our EV page for more.
