Charging an EV From Solar Now Beats Exporting It
By SEBSS Energy Advisory · September 2026 · 7 min read
On 1 July 2026 the regulated feed-in tariff for regional Queensland fell from 8.660 cents to 6.006 cents per kilowatt hour. For a household without an electric vehicle, that is a mildly annoying line on a quarterly bill. If you drive one, it is the single number that should decide when you plug in. Exporting a kilowatt hour now returns about six cents. Buying that same kilowatt hour back after dark costs several times more, and every unit of your own generation you can push into the car during daylight is worth far more than sending it to the grid.
An EV is the best solar load you will ever own
Most household loads are inflexible. A fridge runs when it runs, and an oven runs when dinner needs cooking. An electric vehicle is different: it does not care when it charges, only that it is ready by morning. A typical commute of 40 to 60 kilometres a day consumes roughly 8 to 12 kilowatt hours — comparable to the entire daily consumption of a small household, and completely shiftable.
That flexibility is what makes the arithmetic work. Move that load into the middle of the day and it absorbs generation that would otherwise have earned six cents. Leave it on a midnight timer, inherited from the old off-peak logic that made sense when feed-in rates were high, and you are buying back from the grid what you just gave away.
The switchboard question most quotes skip
This is where EV charging stops being a purchasing decision and becomes an electrical one. A charger is not an appliance you plug in; it is a sustained, high-current load that runs for hours at a time, and Australian wiring rules treat continuous loads differently from intermittent ones.
A compliant installation needs a dedicated circuit running back to the switchboard, sized for continuous rather than intermittent duty, with its own circuit breaker and residual current device rated for the load. The cable feeding a dedicated EV outlet must be at least 2.5mm². Before any of that, the board itself needs a load assessment to confirm there is genuine spare capacity for another sustained draw.
Plenty of Queensland homes — particularly anything with an older board, a full set of circuits, or a switchboard that predates the solar system bolted onto it — do not have that headroom. Finding out after the charger arrives is the expensive way to learn it, which is why our electrical contracting and switchboard work starts with the board rather than the product.
Single-phase or three-phase?
A 7kW single-phase charger delivers roughly 40 kilometres of range per hour of charging. Over a single overnight or midday session that covers virtually any driving pattern short of commercial use. For the overwhelming majority of households it is the right answer, and it is the one we recommend most often.
A 22kW three-phase charger is roughly three times faster, but it is only available if the property already has three-phase supply, and it is only worth the additional cost where vehicles genuinely need to be turned around quickly — a work ute back on the road after lunch, a small fleet sharing one charge point, or a household running two EVs on opposite schedules. Specifying 22kW on a single-phase home is not an upgrade; it is an impossibility. Our EV charger installation quotes state which of the two your supply can actually carry.
Solar-synced charging beats timer charging
A timer is a blunt instrument. It assumes your generation is predictable, which in South East Queensland it very much is not — a bank of cloud at eleven in the morning can halve your output for an hour.
Load-managed, solar-synced charging solves this properly. The charger monitors what your system is actually exporting in real time and modulates its draw to track the surplus, ramping up when the sun is strong and easing back when a cloud passes or the house switches on something large. The car soaks up what would have been exported, and almost nothing is bought back from the grid to do it. On a good day that turns six-cent exports into avoided imports at full retail rate.
Where a battery fits into this
A battery and an EV compete for the same resource: the midday surplus. This matters when sizing either one, and it is the most common modelling error we correct on quotes people bring us.
If the car is home during the day and charges from direct generation, a large battery storage system has less surplus left to absorb and its payback stretches out. If the car is away at work and only returns after sunset, the battery becomes the mechanism that lets you charge it on solar energy generated hours earlier. Those are two different systems, and the right answer depends entirely on where the vehicle physically is between ten and three. Interval data settles it; guesswork does not — the same logic we apply to sizing a home battery without overpaying.
What a compliant installation involves
- A dedicated circuit back to the switchboard, sized for continuous duty
- Its own circuit breaker and RCD, rated for the charger’s sustained load
- Minimum 2.5mm² cable to a dedicated EV charging outlet
- A switchboard load assessment confirming genuine spare capacity
- Network connection approval where your distributor requires it
- Installation and certification by a licensed electrical contractor
Frequently asked questions
Can I just plug into a normal power point?
You can, and it will work, but a standard 10A outlet delivers around 2.4kW — roughly 13 kilometres of range per hour, or about 100 kilometres over a long overnight session. The bigger issue is that general power circuits are designed around intermittent use, not a ten-hour continuous draw. It is acceptable as an occasional top-up and a poor idea as a daily habit.
Do I need to upgrade my switchboard?
Sometimes, and it is not possible to answer honestly without looking. The determining factors are the age and condition of the board, how many circuits are already committed, whether there is physical space for another breaker and RCD, and how much sustained capacity is genuinely spare. A load assessment answers it in one visit.
Will charging from solar affect my feed-in tariff?
No. Self-consumption and export are measured separately. Charging from your own generation simply means less energy crosses the meter as an export — which, at 6.006 cents, is precisely the outcome you want.
Can I add a charger to an existing solar system?
Usually yes. Solar-synced charging needs a way to read your generation and consumption in real time, which most modern inverters and monitoring setups already support. Older systems occasionally need a metering device added, and a residential solar review will confirm it. The array itself rarely needs modification.
Related Services
7kW single-phase and 22kW three-phase chargers, load managed and synced to your rooftop solar.
6.6kW to 25kW+ rooftop systems designed around your household load profile, not just available roof area.
Licensed electrical work under Licence 73850, covering switchboard upgrades and three-phase conversions.
Related reading: how to size a home battery without overpaying, and what changed in the 2026 Australian battery rebates.
Find out what your switchboard can actually take
We assess your board, your solar generation profile and your driving pattern, then quote a charger sized to all three — not just the one on the shelf.