Tibber rewards electric vehicle drivers with “Grid Rewards” for smart charging
The green energy provider Tibber is expanding its smart charging service with the “Grid Rewards” feature. This allows electric vehicle drivers in Germany to participate directly in flexible intraday trading for the first time, earning credits on their electricity bills by shifting usage short-term.
Image: Tibber
The new feature builds on Tibber’s existing smart charging system, which involves scheduling charging times in advance, typically the day before. With “Grid Rewards,” these times can be changed with less than an hour’s notice if, for example, the supply of green energy unexpectedly increases suddenly.
To determine the financial benefits for customers, Tibber distinguishes between three tiered amounts tied to different conditions:
- Up to 150 euros: Households earn this amount solely by participating in “Grid Rewards.” The requirement is that the electric car remains plugged into the charging station after driving, and the software adjusts the charging process every minute to account for short-term fluctuations. The revenue comes directly from selling this flexibility on the electricity exchange’s intraday market.
The background lies in significant potential for grid stabilization: Between January and June 2026 alone, nearly 1.5 terawatt-hours of renewable energy was curtailed in Germany due to a lack of suitable consumers in the short term. Tibber aims to address this issue by aggregating the flexibility of vehicles and using them as a virtual power plant (VPP). As a result, the provider’s total VPP capacity in Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Germany exceeds two gigawatts.
To prevent losses of valuable green energy during periods of high production from solar panels and wind turbines, while also cushioning negative electricity prices in power exchanges, intraday trading relies on decentralized flexibility. Electric vehicles are ideal for this purpose as mobile storage units, provided they can be controlled to serve the grid.
Tibber’s new “Grid Rewards” feature addresses this issue head-on: it connects customers’ vehicles into a virtual power plant (VPP) and automatically utilizes their charging capacity whenever excess electricity needs to be absorbed in the grid on short notice or when load reduction is required due to impending shortages. Households make their electric cars available for this purpose through wallboxes and, in return, receive earnings from short-term intraday electricity trading as a direct credit on their Tibber electricity bill. In other words, the electric cars are not simply charged to full capacity automatically as soon as they’re plugged in; instead, Tibber controls the charging processes and optimizes them for times when large amounts of electricity are available at particularly low prices or even at negative prices.
Tibber Passes On Earnings from Electricity Trading
"Grid Rewards are not a bonus that Tibber pays out to its customers, but rather the revenue generated from trading their own flexibility," emphasizes Wilko Klaassen, Tibber’s head for Germany and the Netherlands. "The energy transition offers more and more opportunities to earn money this way. We want to make as many of these available to our customers as possible."
The requirements for using Grid Rewards are a smart meter, a fully dynamic tariff, and existing smart charging. This feature is included at no additional cost for customers in their base fee.
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