What the EV Flex trial actually tests
ESB Networks, the Irish distribution system operator, and Ohme will recruit EV drivers for a six-month trial that is less about charging speed and more about grid flexibility. The mechanism is simple: plug in every time you park at home, not just when the battery is nearly empty. Ohme’s platform then shifts the charging window to periods of lower grid demand, while the driver still gets a full battery by morning.
Participants can earn a maximum of €78 over six months. That works out to roughly €3 per week if you hit the full payment — a useful nudge, but not a reason to rethink household energy bills on its own.
“Electricity flexibility services could potentially help save consumers money in energy costs and this trial aims to demonstrate that customer engagement is essential in generating more flexibility and helping the system meet peak demand, reducing costs and carbon emissions for everyone,” Ohme CEO David Watson said in the trial announcement.
ESB Networks wants to understand how EV drivers respond to smart charging and whether financial incentives change plug-in behaviour. The project sits alongside its existing flexibility programmes, including “Is This a Good Time?” — an earlier ESB initiative exploring customer willingness to shift electricity use.
The home charging math is stronger than the incentive
As usual, the big money in smart charging is not the trial payment but the tariff spread. Our EV charging cost calculator shows why. Take the 35.7 kWh LFP battery in the Smart #2. If a home tariff charges around €0.45/kWh at peak and €0.10/kWh off-peak, moving one full charge from peak to off-peak saves about €12.50. Over six months — roughly 26 weeks — one shifted full charge per week adds up to about €325.
The same arithmetic scales with battery size. A 106 kWh pack, like the one in the Mercedes-AMG GT 53 EV, would save roughly €37 per full charge at the same €0.35/kWh spread. The €78 trial payment is not the main financial prize; it is a mechanism to teach drivers a habit that is already worth much more.
Actual savings depend on your tariff, plug-in frequency and how much flexibility Ohme actually uses. But the direction is clear: smart charging shifts electricity costs far more effectively than public fast charging.
Public DC remains the expensive backup
Our supercharger database tracks 483 locations across Europe, and the cheapest options still rarely compete with a good home night tariff. Public fast charging is for long trips or apartment dwellers without a wallbox. For anyone with off-street parking in Ireland, a trial like EV Flex reinforces the same lesson: the cheapest kilowatt-hour is the one you don’t buy at a highway station.
What the UK CrowdFlex numbers tell us
Ohme is not new to grid flexibility. The company took part in the UK’s CrowdFlex home energy flexibility trial, which ran from May 2024 to September 2025 and included more than 400 flexibility events. Ohme says it involved up to 20,000 customers per trial, paid participants a total of £750,000 and flexed almost 150 MW of electricity.
Those numbers matter more than the Irish €78 headline. They show that aggregated home chargers can become a meaningful grid resource — and that users will change their habits if the signal is automated and the reward is visible enough. For Ireland, EV Flex is the local test of a model already validated at larger scale in the UK.
What EV owners should take from this
If you have an Ohme wallbox or another smart charger and you live in Ireland, check whether you can join the trial. Even outside the trial, the behaviour change is worth adopting: plug in when you park at home, not when the battery is low. Then let software sort out the cheapest or cleanest charging window.
Before signing up, run your own numbers. Our charging cost calculator can show what shifting charge windows does to your monthly bill, and our cheapest Superchargers page gives a quick reality check on public charging prices. The grid flexibility market is still young, but early participants tend to get the best terms — and the habit pays off even without a pilot programme.
Source: https://www.electrive.com/2026/08/14/ireland-launches-ev-flex-smart-charging-trial/
