Key points
- Australian households and businesses have built one of the world's largest fleets of rooftop solar and are now rapidly adding batteries and electric vehicles (EVs).
- While recent record sales of electric bikes and electric cars underscore Australia's push for energy independence and resilience, we are yet to fully unlock their potential.
- Integrating distributed energy resources such as EVs, rooftop solar and smart appliances is vital to making Australia's grid secure and clean in the century ahead.
Electric vehicles are not only an essential solution to the current fuel crisis, with uptake of bidirectional charging they could accelerate the energy transition.
Dr Gabrielle Kuiper is Australia-Southeast Asia Distributed Energy Resources (DER) specialist at CSIRO and said EVs – and their batteries – had a bigger role to play in the energy system, beyond reducing the liquid fuel consumption of Australia's fleet.
At the end of 2025, Australia's 440,000 EV fleet had the storage equivalent of 57 Victoria Big Batteries or 18 Waratah Super Batteries . By March 2026, the fleet had surpassed half a million vehicles with record sales that month. EVs currently represent about 13 per cent of Australia's total light vehicle sales, up from two per cent in 2021.
"In ten years, I don't think we'll be asking why we integrated cars, batteries and appliances into the electricity system," said Dr Kuiper. "We'll be asking why we were so happy to leave them sitting quietly in the garage and laundry for so long."
Speaking ahead of CEDA's 2026 Climate and Energy Summit , Dr Kuiper, whose work at CSIRO focuses on the role of households and businesses in the electricity transition, cautions against treating distributed energy resources as a nuisance or minor player in Australia's decarbonisation.
"The centre of gravity in our energy system is shifting away from big generation plants at the end of the grid to millions of devices in homes, businesses and depots," she said.
"The challenge is to integrate them well so they can deliver billions of dollars in system wide benefits while improving reliability and reducing emissions."
A parked car shouldn't mean an idle car
One of the most exciting frontiers of the energy transition is vehicle to grid (V2G).
"Like most petrol cars, EVs are parked more than 95 per cent of the time, which means we are literally leaving large, expensive batteries idle in garages and car parks when they could be earning their keep," said Dr Kuiper.
"When EVs have V2G capability, that means they can assist the grid with voltage, reducing peak demand and, in time, deferring traditional network upgrades.
"This is why CSIRO's collaboration with Essential Energy on how parked EVs can support local networks is important, it could bring down the costs of local networks and increase their resilience."
With EVs currently representing around two per cent of Australia's total light vehicle fleet, the potential future storage capacity is nationally significant.
And this is not only about four wheeled passenger vehicles. Two wheeled electric scooters and e bikes, and electric trucks and buses all can play a role.
"The dominance of electric two wheelers in many Asian cities shows how quickly an electric fleet can grow when vehicles are affordable and match people's urban travel patterns," said Dr Kuiper.
At the other end of the spectrum, trucks and buses have big batteries, relatively predictable duty cycles and depot based charging – often ideal business conditions for making V2G viable and profitable.
"Two and four wheeled EVs, electric buses and trucks can all reduce Australia's liquid fuel imports, keep more value in the local economy and provide flexible storage that a renewables dominant grid needs," said Dr Kuiper.
Behind-the-meter-batteries are key
Electric vehicles are mobile storage. To run a high renewables system, we will also need stationary batteries in people's homes and businesses, on distribution networks and at grid scale. Behind the meter batteries can soak up rooftop solar, support households and businesses during outages and participate in virtual power plants.
Distribution connected batteries can support EV charging, especially for electric buses and trucks or fast chargers. Grid scale batteries are already stepping up for frequency control and firming.
"If we get this right, these layers complement each other, and we develop an ecosystem of storage," said Dr Kuiper.
Digitisation links all
Decisions by Australian households and businesses are reshaping demand, pushing down wholesale prices in the middle of day and changing what we need from networks and markets.
But integration of distributed resources into the network will only work when the system can 'see' the energy available.
Good data, communications and control (in the engineering sense) are needed to operate a system where rooftop solar, small batteries and EVs provide a large share of dispatchable capacity.
Work under the National Consumer Energy Resources Roadmap , ARENA's Distributed Energy Integration Program and a raft of projects at CSIRO and across industry all point in the same direction: better visibility and interoperability standards are prerequisites for increasing hosting capacity and using DER at scale.
"Digitisation also makes new commercial models possible," said Dr Kuiper.
"Once we can see and forecast what devices can do, markets and networks can pay for flexibility properly – and we can stop talking about distributed energy resources as something to 'work around' and start treating it as a valuable planning and operational resource."
