The Cheapest Way to Charge an EV in Tasmania: Solar, Off-Peak and Tariffs

Charging an electric car is the single biggest new electricity load most Tasmanian households will ever add. The good news is that it’s also the most flexible one — a car sitting in a carport doesn’t care when it gets its electrons, only that it’s ready by morning. That flexibility is where the money is.

What’s the cheapest way to charge an EV at home in Tasmania?

Your own surplus solar is the cheapest energy you’ll ever put in a car, followed by off-peak grid power on a time-of-use tariff, with peak grid power the dearest of the three. Public DC fast charging sits above all of them. So the cheapest charge is the one you plan, not the one you panic-buy.

Here’s why solar surplus wins. When your panels send a kilowatt-hour to the grid, Aurora Energy’s regulated feed-in tariff pays you 9.276 c/kWh from 1 July 2026 (up from 8.782c in 2025–26). When you buy a kilowatt-hour back, you pay a retail import price of roughly 28–30 c/kWh. So if you divert that kilowatt-hour into the car instead of exporting it, the only thing it really “costs” you is the feed-in tariff you gave up — a fraction of what the same energy costs from the grid.

This is the whole logic of rooftop solar in Tasmania, and an EV just makes it louder: self-consumption, not export, is where the savings are.

How much does each unit of charging energy actually cost?

Where the energy comes from	What it effectively costs you	When you can use it
Your own surplus solar	Only the feed-in tariff you forgo — 9.276 c/kWh from 1 July 2026	Daylight hours, best in the middle of the day
Off-peak grid (time-of-use tariff)	The cheaper of your tariff’s two rates	Overnight, mid-morning to mid-afternoon, all weekend on Tariff 93
Peak grid	The dearest rate on your tariff	Weekday mornings and evenings — avoid if you can
Public DC fast charging	More again than any home option	On the road, when you need speed not savings

We’re deliberately not putting a dollar-per-year figure on this. What you actually spend depends on your tariff, how far you drive and how big your array is. Take the cost of each unit of energy above, multiply by your own kilometres, and you’ll have a far more honest number than any brochure can give you.

Which Tasmanian tariff suits an EV household?

Since 1 July 2024, every new or upgraded residential connection is assigned to Tariff 93, the whole-of-home residential time-of-use tariff. Peak is weekdays 7–10am and 4–9pm (8–11am and 5–10pm during daylight saving). Everything else is off-peak — including all weekend.

That last point matters enormously for EV owners. If the car is home on a Saturday afternoon, you can charge it at the off-peak rate and soak up solar at the same time.

Tariff 97 is the newer opt-in residential tariff designed for homes with solar, a battery or an EV. Its key feature is the one no other Tasmanian tariff has: a super off-peak rate from midnight to 4am, every day including weekends. Its peak runs weekdays 7–10am and 4–10pm — an hour longer in the evening than Tariff 93 — and it carries an excess demand charge for demand above 8.5 kW. Whether you can actually get a Tariff 97 retail plan depends on your retailer.

A few things worth being clear about, because they’re commonly muddled:

Tariff 97 is not a hot-water or controlled-load tariff. That’s Tariff 41, the separately metered flat rate for hard-wired heating and hot water.
Tariff 31 (flat general light and power) and Tariff 41 are the legacy pair, closed to new installations on 30 June 2024. Existing homes may stay on them, but neither is time-of-use — so there’s no cheap overnight window to charge into.
Tariff 93 and 97 are whole-of-home. Shifting your car’s charge out of peak is easy; shifting your evening cooking isn’t. Weigh both.

If you’re weighing Tariff 97, the honest test is whether you’ll genuinely use that midnight–4am window most nights, and whether a longer evening peak and a demand charge above 8.5 kW would eat the benefit. A 7 kW charger running while the oven and heat pump are on can push a home past that threshold, so stagger your big loads.

How fast does a home charger actually charge?

A 7 kW single-phase wall charger adds roughly 38 to 45 km of driving range per hour. A standard 10 amp power point delivers about a third of that.

For most Tasmanian households, that’s the whole story: a few hours on a wall charger covers a typical day’s driving, and even a power point will do it overnight if your commute is modest. You don’t need to chase speed at home — you need enough speed to finish inside your cheap window.

Do I need more solar if I’m adding an EV?

Probably more than the old default, yes. A system of around 13 kW of panels on a 10 kW inverter — using the 133% inverter oversizing rule — has become the sensible, future-proof choice for households that will electrify with an EV, a heat pump and induction cooking. It’s a clear step up from the 6.6 kW systems of a few years ago.

Helpfully, TasNetworks allows a 10 kW single-phase inverter in Tasmania, so most homes do not need to pay for a three-phase upgrade. The federal STC rebate under the SRES discounts the up-front cost, and Tasmania sits in STC Zone 4.

Be honest with yourself in the other direction too: a very low-use home with no EV, no battery and no electrification plans may be better served by something smaller. Solar paybacks in Tasmania are generally discussed in the four-to-six-year range, and battery paybacks considerably longer — but those are general ranges, not a prediction for your house.

Does a battery make EV charging cheaper here?

It can help, but Tasmania is a tougher case than the mainland, and we’d rather say so. Our relatively cheap power and fair feed-in tariff mean the battery portion of a system typically pays back more slowly here — commonly spoken of in the seven-to-twelve-year range, depending on your tariff, usage and price.

The federal Cheaper Home Batteries Program, running since 1 July 2025, generally takes around 30% off the cost of an eligible battery — roughly $250 per usable kWh in 2026 at the full rate for the first 14 kWh, then 60% for 14–28 kWh and 15% for 28–50 kWh, capped at 50 kWh. Eligibility conditions apply, including that the battery is paired with solar, and the rate tapers each year to 2030. There is no separate Tasmanian state battery rebate.

No vendor or retail VPP program operates in Tasmania. Wholesale-price exposure does exist through spot-passthrough retailing, and with automated control a battery can charge when spot prices go negative and avoid peak imports — Solar Generation runs exactly this on its own systems. For a typical household on an Aurora tariff without spot exposure, the realistic value of a battery is self-consumption plus backup during an outage.

What if the car is never home during the day?

Then your cheap window is overnight off-peak, not solar — and that’s fine. Set the car or charger to start after your peak ends, and if you’re on Tariff 97, inside the midnight–4am super off-peak block. Use weekends for solar charging, when Tariff 93 is off-peak all day and your panels are working.

The practical takeaway

Do these three things, in this order:

Find out which tariff you’re actually on. It’s on your bill. Everything else follows from this.
Set a charging schedule once. Daytime when you’re home and the sun’s up; otherwise straight into off-peak. A timer you set once beats willpower every night.
Size your solar for the household you’ll have in five years, not the one you have today — and don’t buy a battery expecting it to behave like a mainland battery.

Charge on sunshine when the car’s home, charge off-peak when it isn’t, and treat peak-hour charging as the emergency option. That single habit does more for your running costs than any piece of hardware.

This guide is written by the Tasmanian solar team at Solar Generation Tasmania. We’re locals, we run this gear on our own roofs, and we’re always happy to answer a question from a fellow Tasmanian trying to work it out.

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Published by Solar Generation Tasmania. General information current as at publication — rebates, tariffs and prices change, so confirm current figures before deciding.