The Australian federal government’s Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) has announced AU$30 million (US$21 million) in grants across 14 projects under its Grid Enhancing Technologies (GET) Grant Program, with vehicle-to-grid (V2G) charging and smart EV charging incentives among the funded use cases.
The programme, which runs from 2025-26 to 2028-29 and forms part of the government’s broader Rewiring the Nation initiative, offers individual grants of up to AU$5 million per project on a competitive basis.
Eligible applicants include Australian-incorporated businesses, universities, publicly funded research organisations and government bodies.
Projects must demonstrate how their technology could be scaled and applied more broadly across the electricity network to benefit Australian households and businesses.
The 14 funded projects span six states and territories, including Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia and the Australian Capital Territory.
The solutions being trialled cover a range of approaches to improving how the electricity network handles growing and shifting electricity demand.
Among them, projects will test using EVs as distributed batteries to help power homes and support the grid during high-demand periods and give EV owners financial incentives to charge when electricity is cheaper and more readily available, a form of demand management that shifts charging load away from peak times.
Other funded projects will focus on coordinating large-scale battery storage systems across the network to reduce pressure on the grid and on technologies that keep the grid stable during periods of high solar generation.
Chris Bowen, Australia’s Minister for Climate Change and Energy, said the programme would enable more renewable energy to flow through the grid more quickly, enabling households and businesses to extract greater value from rooftop solar and battery storage.
“The Grid Enhancing Technologies grants will support more renewables in the system, put downward pressure on energy bills, and build a stronger, more resilient grid,” he said.
Growing EV uptake sharpens the grid challenge
The timing of the GET programme reflects the pace at which Australia’s EV fleet is expanding.
Australian EV sales reached 27.5% of all new light vehicle sales in April 2026, up from 1.9% in April 2022, with Bowen noting that Australians were purchasing one EV every three minutes during that month.
The rate of adoption places growing pressure on distribution networks to manage the additional electricity demand from charging, particularly during evening peak periods when vehicles are typically plugged in after daily use.
The GET programme’s inclusion of smart-charging incentive projects directly addresses this. By rewarding EV owners financially for charging during off-peak periods or when solar generation is high, the funded projects aim to turn EV charging from a source of grid stress into a tool for balancing electricity supply and demand.
Australia’s largest residential V2G trial, run by renewable energy retailer Amber Electric, has shown that a 33-vehicle fleet generated AU$567 in energy value over a 30-day period when grid conditions were unremarkable, with solar load-shifting, charging vehicles during the day and using that stored energy to run homes at night, emerging as the dominant use case.
The GET programme’s V2G component sits within this emerging market, funding trials to test whether bidirectional charging can be coordinated at a network level rather than at the household level.
The regulatory framework around these technologies is also developing. The Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC), the rule-making body for Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM), launched a review of electricity network regulation with EV charging at the centre, examining how network tariffs and connection rules need to adapt as EV charging becomes a material part of electricity demand across the NEM.
The GET programme is structured as a one-time, competitive grant round rather than an ongoing funding facility.
Applicants were required to demonstrate how their proposed technology could move from trial to wider application, with the DCCEEW’s stated goal being to build an evidence base on costs, benefits, and deployment pathways for technologies already in use in some markets but not yet widely applied to Australian electricity networks.