The German power supplier Tibber switched on a feature called Grid Rewards on 11 September 2026. It pays electric-car drivers for letting the company decide, at under an hour's notice, exactly when their car draws power.
What it actually does
Tibber already sells Smart Charging, which picks cheap hours the day before from the day-ahead price curve. Grid Rewards works on a shorter clock. When wind or solar output jumps unexpectedly, or the grid hits a bottleneck, Tibber can move a charging session with less than one hour's notice, and sells that flexibility on the intraday market of the power exchange. The revenue comes back as a credit on the electricity bill.
Technically it bundles customers' cars into a virtual power plant. Tibber puts its existing VPP capacity across Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands at more than 2 GW.
One thing it is not: this is load shifting, not vehicle-to-grid. The car absorbs power at better moments. It never sends any back.
The numbers Tibber quotes
| Per year | |
|---|---|
| Grid Rewards alone | up to EUR 150 |
| With Smart Charging | up to EUR 440 |
| Including Germany's reduced grid fee for controllable charging | up to EUR 630 |
All three assume 10,000 km a year. That is a modest annual mileage, which cuts both ways — it is not an inflated best case built on a 30,000 km driver, but it does mean the figures scale with how much you actually charge at home.
Wilko Klaassen, who runs Tibber's German and Dutch business, framed the economics directly: Grid Rewards "aren't a subsidy Tibber pays — they're earnings from trading customer flex."
What you need
A smart meter, a fully dynamic tariff, Smart Charging already active, and a compatible wallbox. There is no extra charge; it is included in the existing subscription.
The wallbox requirement is the catch worth checking before signing up. Many Tesla owners in Germany charge on a wallbox Tibber can control, but many others rely on the car's own scheduled-charging function — and Tibber has not published which hardware qualifies. If minute-by-minute control has to run through the box rather than the car, that determines whether this is available to you at all.
How it compares, and where else in Europe it lands
This is the second German flexibility product in as many days. Audi and Octopus Energy switched on a vehicle-to-grid tariff that pays a EUR 30 monthly bonus but demands 300 hours a month plugged in — roughly ten hours a day — and works only on two Audi models.
Tibber's is the less ambitious and far more widely applicable of the two. No export, no bidirectional wallbox, no approved car list, a smaller headline number, and none of the battery-cycling questions that the standards work on AC vehicle-to-grid is still resolving.
For a Tesla owner in Germany on a dynamic tariff, that is the honest summary: a small, low-commitment gain for surrendering control of when the car charges overnight. Whether EUR 150 is worth that depends entirely on how predictable your mornings are.
The wider European question is which market gets it next. Tibber already runs its virtual power plant in Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands, and Germany is the addition here — but the euro figures above are German, because they depend on German intraday prices and on the German reduced grid fee for controllable charging, which has no equivalent in the other three. Owners elsewhere in Europe should expect the mechanism to travel and the numbers not to. Tibber has not said which market is next.