For a growing number of Irish households, buying an electric vehicle is no longer purely a transport decision. It is increasingly the moment a family starts paying attention to how their whole home uses power.
“An EV can become one of the largest electrical loads in a home, so suddenly households have a real financial reason to think not just about how much electricity they use but also when they use it and where that electricity comes from,” explains Pearse McHenry, chief revenue officer at myenergi, the home energy technology company. “The EV is often the catalyst that gets a household thinking about its energy as one connected system rather than a collection of separate products.”
An Electric Ireland spokesperson says: “Those with an EV charger installed will often also examine smart meter tariffs to find the best value, which is then creating greater awareness of energy use across appliances, time of use and the home more broadly.”
Customers with a home charger and a smart meter can move on to tariffs such as Electric Ireland’s Home Electric+ Night Boost, which offers a reduced overnight rate and a cheaper “boost” window between 2am and 4am.
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“This gives EV drivers a clear incentive to shift charging to lower-cost periods while also encouraging them to think about when they use other appliances and technologies in the home.”
The myth of the runaway electricity bill
Both energy providers point to the same misconception holding some prospective buyers back: the assumption that charging a car at home will automatically send the electricity bill soaring.
“A common misconception is that home charging will automatically lead to a large increase in the electricity bill, regardless of how or when the car is charged,” the Electric Ireland spokesperson says. “Most drivers do not need to recharge a completely empty battery every night, and a smart charger combined with a suitable time-of-use tariff can move much of that demand to lower-cost overnight periods.”
According to the company’s 2026 Sustainability Index, 76 per cent of respondents with a home charger said they felt they were saving money, with perceived average fuel savings of €91 a month, though the spokesperson stresses that “actual savings will vary by mileage, vehicle efficiency, tariff and charging pattern”.
McHenry identifies a common mistake as consumers reckoning all EV chargers are essentially the same.
“For most Irish homes, charging speed isn’t really the differentiator; domestic chargers will typically operate at up to and around 7kW. The important question is how intelligently the charger manages that energy.” He adds that solar panel ownership is not a prerequisite for savings either.
“You don’t need solar panels to benefit from smart charging. With the right electricity tariff, simply moving a large flexible load like an EV away from expensive peak periods can materially reduce the cost of charging.”
From charger to ecosystem
So when do consumers really need to start considering the wider context of their energy supply system and what it might mean to opt for an EV?
For Electric Ireland, it begins at the assessment stage. “Understanding the customer’s driving pattern, current electricity use, smart meter status and home electrical capacity helps identify the right charger and whether a time-of-use tariff could reduce charging costs,” the spokesperson says.
“The objective is not to recommend every technology to every customer, but to identify a sensible sequence of upgrades for that particular home.”
The company’s Superhomes service, they note, offers a “One Stop Shop” covering home assessment, SEAI grants and retrofit works including insulation, solar PV and heat pumps, since “a heat pump works best in an appropriately insulated home”.
McHenry says the first logical step for new EV owners is usually the electricity tariff.
“Once people see the difference between buying electricity at peak times and charging overnight or during cheaper periods, they start applying the same thinking elsewhere in the home,” he says.
“Hot water, heating, solar and battery storage then become part of the same conversation.”
What’s exciting, he says, is how automation is replacing manual management entirely. “We’re moving away from asking consumers to manually manage all of those individual assets. The future has now arrived as the myenergi home energy system can make those decisions automatically, looking at the tariff, solar generation, household demand and the energy required by the car, and deciding the most economical way to manage them.”
Asked whether there is a correct order for adopting solar, an EV and battery storage, McHenry rejects the premise. “I don’t think there is one universal order, because every household is different,” he says.
“Rather than prescribing a sequence of products, I’d start with the household: how much energy do you use, when do you use it, what can you generate yourself and which loads can you move?”
He notes that falling costs are changing the calculation too: “As battery storage costs have now dropped significantly, we are seeing even more scenarios of battery storage being installed, even without solar.”
Cars that power homes
And there are more exciting changes to the home energy ecosystem on the way. Vehicle-to-home and vehicle-to-grid technology lets an EV’s battery feed energy back into the house or the grid.
“It’s important to separate three technologies that are often grouped together,” says McHenry. Vehicle-to-load, or V2L, essentially allows the battery in your EV to power external electrical devices. Vehicle-to-home, or V2H, goes significantly further by allowing energy stored in the vehicle to supply the home. Vehicle-to-grid, or V2G, adds another layer by allowing that energy to interact with the electricity system.”
V2L is already commercially available, he says, but the other two “require the right combination of compatible vehicles, charging hardware, standards, network requirements and commercial arrangements.”
Even so, McHenry says the potential is “enormous”.
“An EV has a battery many times larger than a typical domestic home battery. If we can intelligently unlock even part of that capacity, the car stops being simply something that consumes electricity and becomes an active part of the home’s energy system.”
For now, though, McHenry is clear about where the actual savings are being made today. “It’s overwhelmingly smart charging and load-shifting,” he says.
“That’s much less exciting to talk about than powering your house from your car, but it’s where consumers can make a financial difference every day.”
Storm resilience is becoming a secondary consideration, he adds, particularly “for those that experienced prolonged outages” during Storm Éowyn, “but I think it’s important to be realistic. Most consumers aren’t investing in home energy technology purely for the occasional outage. They’re investing because it can reduce their energy costs every day.”
Cost, complexity and confusion
Both sources agree that upfront cost remains the single biggest obstacle to wider adoption, but each adds a second, less obvious barrier.
For Electric Ireland, it is a lack of understanding. “Upfront cost remains the most significant barrier, but complexity and awareness are closely linked,” the spokesperson says, citing the Sustainability Index finding that 54 per cent of people named lack of money as their main barrier, while 36 per cent “would like to live more sustainably but do not know how”, and 39 per cent “find sustainability messaging confusing”. Only 15 per cent of adults, the survey found, said they were “very familiar with how much electricity different appliances use”.
For McHenry, the second barrier is a fragmented supply chain. “A consumer might buy the EV from one company, the charger from another, solar from another installer and electricity from a separate energy supplier,” he says.
“Effectively, we’re asking homeowners to become their own energy systems integrators.”
He believes Ireland already has the underlying conditions for the transition to work, with “growing EV adoption, smart meters, increasingly sophisticated electricity tariffs, a strong solar market and significant renewable generation on the electricity system”.
But he says the industry now needs to do the hard part for consumers. “The next step is making all of that complexity disappear for the consumer. That’s ultimately what the smart-energy transition is about: not adding complexity to people’s homes, but removing it.”
