AGL grabs big share of EV home charging market as it plots future beyond coal

AGL remains Australia’s biggest coal generator, but it says it its early moves into home electric vehicle charging schemes and virtual power plants is starting to pay off.

In its latest earnings result released on Wednesday, AGL says it now has more than 1.5 gigawatts of decentralised assets “under orchestration”, referring to VPPs, home batteries and the EV charging offers.

It says it has more than 35,000 EV customers on one of its bespoke charging plans, half of them new customers, and the average daily load of EV customers is shifting to the overnight “super off peak”.

“We continue to capture a disproportionate share of the rapidly growing EV market,” CEO Damien Nicks said in a presentation to market analysts, highlighting the ability to orchestrate EV battery load – a development that will be critical in a grid that shifts from “baseload” thinking to flexible demand and supply.

“At the half year results, I highlighted that we are capturing a disproportionate share of the rapidly growing EV market, and as you can see on the left-hand side (of the graph above), we’ve continued to outpace the growth in the number of EVs on the road over the last six months,” he said.

“I’ve spoken in the past about how we can orchestrate hot water systems to solar soak and optimise load profile management,” Nicks said.

“Importantly, we are capturing value from the opportunity to orchestrate the ever-increasing flexible load of EV batteries, through smart charging and enabling vehicle to grid-integration.

He also made note of the EV Night Saver Plan and subsidiary Ovo Energy’s “Free 3 Plan”, which offers three hours of free energy from 11am to 2pm, and is particularly geared towards EV owners.

“We have a compelling suite of EV plans, propositions and partnerships which will form the foundation of future expected growth,” Nicks said. “We now have approximately 35,000 EV energy plan customers with an excellent NPS score of +41 for our EV Night Saver customers.

“Our EV Night Saver plan … has seen up to 22 percent of customer’s daily load shifted to the lower-tariff overnight window, optimising both pricing and portfolio outcomes for AGL and our customers.”

See also: AGL says batteries will be its new cash cow as coal fades in switch from baseload to grid flexibility