Plug in to smart EV charging

You can charge from your excess solar with Amber for EVs - meaning your charge rate will adjust depending on whether there is excess solar available.

At the moment, we support the following inverters for excess solar charging for EVs with Amber:

• SolarEdge inverters
• Most Sungrow inverters*
• Single Fronius inverter

*Our full list of supported batteries and inverters

Supported inverters will also have access to our Curtailment functionality which helps mitigate costs incurred from exporting when Feed-in prices drop below zero.

It might sound strange, but we want to help you do more of what benefits you, not us. Whether that’s charging from your solar, rather than just the grid energy we can sell you, or even paying you to charge when wholesale prices go negative (yes, that's right - with Amber wholesale prices fluctuate, even going into negative territory every now and again. This means we pay you to use energy at these times!).

It all comes down to our subscription model, which means we don’t make money off each kilowatt hour of energy you use like other companies. This means we can stay super focused on helping you do more of what you want - not more of what benefits us. It also means we don’t encourage you to charge overnight just so that we can keep our coal plants running profitably, like other energy companies do (in fact, we don't have any coal plants!).

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Unlike other retailers, Amber has only one “plan”. We give you direct access to the wholesale market for our $22/month subscription fee (the subscription fee is the only income we generate to run the business as we don't make profits on your energy usage). And we give you the tech to take advantage of wholesale prices and your own solar energy.

Energy in the wholesale market can get extra cheap during the day when renewable energy floods the grid, which means you can really drive your charging costs down by charging more at these times. In addition to helping you use more of your excess solar to charge your car (if you have solar), we believe this is a great way for you to save big on charging your car.

Other energy retailers pay the wholesale price for their power and then pass this through to customers with a retail mark-up. Often the offers they propose for EV owners look very appealing on one hand, and less appealing on the other, when you look at costs holistically. For example, if you have access to “free energy” during the day, you are likely to get charged a high price at all other hours. We recommend assessing these offers with this in mind.

All energy retailers buy their electricity from the same wholesale electricity market, where prices are set every 30 minutes by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO). The wholesale price is the true price for your usage that Amber (and other retailers) have to pay to provide you energy. 

It’s normal for the wholesale price to fluctuate up or down in each 30 minute period depending on supply and demand, encouraging more power generation when the grid needs it, and less when it doesn’t.

The wholesale price that Amber passes through includes wholesale energy costs (which vary every 30 mins), hedging costs (a small fee to cover the cost of offering our Amber price guarantee), the rates charged by your local network (who own the poles and wires), metering costs and regulated charges for environmental schemes and market operations. We also add on a carbon offset to make your energy use carbon neutral.

Amber makes nothing at all from your energy usage. Our $22/month subscription fee is our only margin for running Amber.

Check out this explainer to learn more about what drives the wholesale price up and down. You can find out more about what your bill with Amber would include here.

Charging your car at the right price is crucial. Both to look after your wallet and of course, also to use less dirty energy from the grid. Amber for EVs will keep an eye on prices and ensure that you're charging at optimal times, avoiding high price periods - including demand windows, if you're on a demand tariff.

Our Battery and EV optimisation systems currently don’t play all that well together, as they are pretty much running independently and unaware of each other. Improving coordination between our EV and battery optimisation systems is high on our priority list for the coming months.That said, you can take advantage of both Amber for EVs and SmartShift now if you are willing to engage to a certain degree.A bit of background on what’s going on under the hood that can cause sub-optimal behaviour and how you can address this:

• Excess solar charging with Amber for EVs basically tracks the amount of solar energy that goes to grid from your home to decide if/when there is “excess” to charge your EV battery, however battery discharging may also cause grid exporting.
• From the battery’s perspective, EV charging is just another household load, so it may discharge battery energy into your EV.

For this reason, we recommend testers to put their battery to “Preserve charge” mode via the manual controls in the Amber app when they want to use the charging from excess solar feature. You’ll need to change it back when excess solar charging is complete.We realise this is not ideal. As mentioned, battery and EV co-optimisation is one of the focuses for the upcoming months for the EV team, as whole system optimisation is the ultimate goal.

We arelooking for people such as yourself to help us test and improve the product for those in this scenario.