During the IAA Mobility 2025, Volkswagen Group subsidiary Elli presented a pilot project for bidirectional (“Bidi”) charging in private households for the first time. In the future, homes can be powered by EV batteries and the home’s solar power system.
A key component of the Bidi pilot project is a legally compliant 11 kW bidirectional charger that connects home solar and the EV with a modular software platform developed by Elli.
The bidirectional charger, developed in cooperation with Elli’s partner CUBOS – a leading provider of sustainable energy solutions – enables the EV battery to be used as a home energy storage unit and powers households with self-generated solar energy. Energy from the grid, the vehicle, and the home are managed intuitively via the Elli Charging app.
With smart bidirectional home charging, customers can significantly reduce their charging costs under certain conditions, in some cases by up to 75 percent. At the same time, independence from the electricity grid can be achieved to a comparable extent through the use of self-generated solar power combined with bidirectional charging.
Volkswagen Group’s customers and solar panel provider OTOVO’s customers can apply for Elli’s pilot initiative, which will launch in Germany in December 2025. As part of the project, Elli will provide selected participants with a DC bidirectional charger.
Volkswagen Group EVs built on the MEB platform – including select Volkswagen Passenger Cars, Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, and CUPRA models with software version ID. Software 3.5 or higher and 77 kWh batteries – are already technically capable of enabling DC bidirectional charging. With this pilot project, Elli seamlessly builds on existing technological capabilities and brings them into private homes.
Scaling Bidi charging across Europe
To analyze the regional scalability of bidirectional charging on a European level, the Volkswagen Group is conducting several innovation projects, including one led by Volkswagen in Sweden. The testing campus, set up in 2021 in collaboration with the Stenberg housing cooperative, is designed to showcase and evaluate the technical energy functionalities and CO₂ impact of vehicle-to-home and vehicle-to-grid charging.
Elli’s mission is to bring bidirectional charging to market maturity and enable Europe-wide commercialization. This requires scaling both hardware and software for customer-side energy integration, and supporting harmonized EU-wide legislation.
Energy trading with the Managed Battery Network
The new Bidi ecosystem is connected to Elli’s “Managed Battery Network” (MBN), the company’s virtual power plant. This smart energy system optimizes the use of renewable energy by storing electricity at specific times of the day and making it available later through wholesale energy trading.
The vision behind this approach is future-oriented, significantly reducing EV charging costs, maximizing renewable energy usage, and supporting the energy transition in Europe.
By the end of the decade, Elli aims to integrate large-scale storage systems and hundreds of thousands of EV batteries across Europe into a Managed Battery Network (MBN), orchestrating the integration and monetization of storage capacities through its own energy trading platform. This approach will enable better use of volatile renewable energy and accelerate the energy transition in Europe.
In the first step, beginning in 2026, several hundred decentralized EVs will be connected to a virtual power plant (VPP) for the first time. Subsequently, Elli will market these flexibilities via its own trading operations on the EPEX intraday power exchange.
Elli PowerCenter for large-scale storage
In parallel, Elli is launching its large-scale energy storage business. The new Elli PowerCenter will be completed in Salzgitter in December. The facility, with a capacity of 20 MW and 40 MWh, uses LFP battery packs from PowerCo and will serve as a platform for energy trading and future grid services.
With this step, Elli is entering a new business area within the energy value chain and positioning itself as a key provider of energy and flexibility solutions.
