What changed, and when
AS/NZS 4777.2:2020 is the standard that says how an inverter may connect to the grid in Australia and New Zealand. If a device pushes electricity into the network, this is the document that governs it.
23 Aug 2025
The day Amendment 2 to AS/NZS 4777.2:2020 took effect, giving Australia a settled grid-connection pathway for bidirectional electric vehicle charging for the first time.
Amendment 2 was published in August 2024 and came into effect on 23 August 2025. It introduced clauses permitting bidirectional electric vehicle charging, which is the technical basis for vehicle-to-home and vehicle-to-grid in this country. Before it, there was no settled grid-connection pathway for a car that exports.
The amendment splits the problem by a single question: where does the inverter live?
| Mode | Where the inverter sits | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Mode 4 | In the wall-side supply equipment | Settled |
| Mode 3 | Inside the vehicle | Unresolved |
Mode 4 puts the conversion in the wall-side equipment. That equipment is an inverter in the ordinary sense, so it falls within AS/NZS 4777.2 and sits in scope of the Clean Energy Council approved inverter list. There is a path, and products are on it.
Mode 3 puts the conversion inside the vehicle, leaving the wall equipment closer to a smart socket. The standard permits the mode. How it is covered, listed and approved remains explicitly unresolved, and that is the honest gap.
The distinction matters more than it sounds. Mode 4 puts the regulated component in a box on a wall, which fits the existing approvals machinery. Mode 3 puts it inside a vehicle that was type-approved as a vehicle, by a manufacturer who did not submit it to an inverter standard, in a market with no settled mechanism for listing it. That is not a technicality. It decides which products can legally export here.
How listing works after the change
The Clean Energy Council did not require every previously listed inverter to be retested. Manufacturers instead had to demonstrate that relevant products complied with Amendment 2 by providing a manufacturer declaration with supporting evidence. From 23 August 2025, where the Council finds evidence that a model is not compliant with the amendment, it may remove that model from the approved inverter list.
So the enforcement posture is declaration first, removal as the sanction. That is a lighter touch than retesting, and it puts weight on the accuracy of what manufacturers declare. By April 2026 a small but growing number of bidirectional chargers carried Council approval.
Compliance and compatibility are different questions
The practical reading, without the standards vocabulary: a wall unit that converts the power itself has a path, and approval covers the box on the wall rather than the car. A setup relying on the car's own inverter sits in less settled territory, because the mode is permitted in principle while the listing route is not resolved.
The third point is where buyers are most likely to be caught. Whether a vehicle will export is decided by the vehicle's software and the manufacturer's decisions, not by the Australian standard. A charger can be fully compliant and still not work with a given car.
Vendors are unusually candid about this. Sigenergy publishes field-test results for vehicle compatibility, filterable by country. Filtered to Australia on 27 July 2026, the Tesla rows read as follows.
| Model | Charging interface | Test date | Region |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tesla Model 3 | CCS2 | 1 Jun 2025 | Australia |
| Tesla Model Y | CCS2 | 1 Jul 2025 | Australia |
| Tesla Model Y LR | CCS2 | 1 Sep 2025 | Australia |
Those are vendor test results, and the vendor says so plainly on the same page. Its wording, verbatim: "Because the vehicle manufacturer has not officially announced the V2X feature, these test results are independent and have not been recognized or certified by the manufacturer."
Read that carefully, because it is doing real work. A vendor's own testing showing that a car can export is not the same as the carmaker supporting it, warranting it, or committing to keep supporting it through the next software update. Both things can be true at once: the hardware worked on the day it was tested, and nobody has promised it will work tomorrow. The Australian rows are not confined to Tesla either; the same filtered view carries entries from Geely, Volvo, BYD, Ford, Kia, MG, Nissan and Polestar, almost all on CCS2.
The gap worth watching
Australia now has a functioning pathway for bidirectional charging where the inverter is on the wall. It does not have a settled one where the inverter is in the car. Much of the industry's direction of travel, and much of the marketing, points at the second case.
Whether Mode 3 gets a listing route, and who is responsible for declaring compliance when the regulated component is a vehicle, is the question the next revision has to answer. Until it does, that is the honest state of it: a rule that goes half the distance.