Using your parked car as a battery — running the house off it in the evening, or selling power back — has been about to arrive for years. It is genuinely hard to find out how far along it really is, because the announcements and the trial press releases outnumber the products.
There is one number that cuts through it, and it is public.
Any equipment that sends electricity back out of your house has to be tested in a lab first, and the results go on a public list. A charger that can push power back has to be on it. An ordinary charger, which only ever draws power in, is never on it — there is nothing for it to be tested for.
Today that list has 17 entries, from 11 manufacturers, for the whole country. You can read all of them in one sitting.
The proper names, now that you know what they mean: a charger that works both ways is called vehicle-to-grid, or V2G; the list is the Energy Networks Association's register of tested equipment.
What the seventeen look like
The oldest entries date from February 2021; the newest from May 2026. Registered capacities run from 3.68kW to 10.5kW — single-phase at the low end, three-phase at the top — so this is domestic-scale equipment, not commercial hardware.
A few things stand out when you read the rows rather than count them.
Several manufacturers hold more than one entry for what is recognisably the same product at different power ratings, which is what a type test regime looks like from the inside: 3.68kW and 5kW variants of the same charger are separate tests and separate rows.
Some entries are combinations rather than products. One energy supplier's rows name a car, a chargepoint and a metering component together. That is a reasonable way to type test a system whose behaviour depends on all three, and it is also a reminder that a row on this register is a tested configuration, not a thing you can necessarily buy in that form.
A car manufacturer's rows are labelled as testing. Entries naming a specific model year and a test reference are a manufacturer working through the process, which is a useful signal about where a programme has got to — and not the same thing as a product on a shelf.
The tested list and the shops do not agree
We hold a catalogue of chargepoints on sale in the UK alongside the register, and the two do not line up.
We found two bidirectional units genuinely on sale to UK consumers, and could not match either of them to a register row. Meanwhile at least one manufacturer that is on the register does not retail its bidirectional unit to consumers at all.
Both halves of that need care, so here is exactly what we mean and what we do not.
Not matching a row is a statement about our data first. Retail names and register names drift systematically across every category we hold — a product sold under one model name is registered under a part number, or under a parent company, or as a combination with two other components. "We could not match it" means we could not match it. It is not a verdict about the product, and we are not going to present it as one.
But it is worth acting on. There is a question here you can ask and get a straight answer to, and almost nobody in the market invites it: what is this unit's reference number on the tested list? Anyone selling a charger that works both ways should be able to answer it in one line. If the answer is a reference, you can check it yourself in thirty seconds. If the answer is a brochure, that tells you something too.
The pattern is not unique to this category. Across the market as a whole we found exactly one seller of any exporting equipment that publishes its ENA System Reference on the product page. It is a low bar and it is nearly empty.
An ordinary charger is not on the list, and that means nothing
This is the part where the register is easiest to misread, so it is worth being blunt.
A normal EV chargepoint can never appear on this register. It is load: it draws electricity and never sends any back, so it is not type tested for grid connection and there is nothing for it to be listed as. We checked every row we hold across all four categories — 9,279 devices — and none of the mainstream UK chargepoint brands appears. That is exactly what the rules predict.
If you search our register for your Ohme, Wallbox, Easee, Hypervolt, Pod Point, Andersen, EO or Zaptec charger and find nothing, you have not found a problem with it. You have found the edge of what the register covers.
The rules that do govern an ordinary chargepoint are the Electric Vehicles (Smart Charge Points) Regulations 2021, which set default off-peak charging, a randomised delay to stop a whole street switching on at once, and security requirements. There is no public register behind those that we hold or can mirror, so we do not pretend to check them.
And one more, because it travels: nothing about SI 2026/848 applies here. The 800W cap, the no-battery test and the plug-and-socket test are the plug-in solar route's, and they have nothing to do with a chargepoint of any kind.
What we would ask before buying one
- What is its reference number on the tested list? Then check it on our copy of the list or on the ENA's own Connect Direct platform.
- Which cars does it actually work with, today? Bidirectional charging is a negotiation between the car and the charger, and support is per-model.
- Which tariff pays for the export, and on what terms? The value of a bidirectional charger is a tariff question, and export rates in this market vary by a factor of five depending on who supplies you — we have written about that here.
- What does your Distribution Network Operator require? An exporting device is notified under G98 or G99 like any other generator. That is a real step and it is a fixed installation, not a plug-in one.
- What does cycling the car's battery do to its warranty? Ask the vehicle manufacturer, in writing, not the charger seller.
Register counts on this page are read from our mirror of the ENA register when the page is served, so they are current rather than frozen. Retail findings checked 29 August 2026.
Related reading: what the ENA register actually covers — and what its silence does not mean.