Britain’s homes are set to increasingly play the role of power plant this year following the world’s largest roll out of electric car chargers that can sell stored electricity to the UK grid.

Energy supplier Ovo Energy said the largest ever trial of smart vehicle chargers will mean electric car owners “never need to pay for a mile of driving again” because they will automatically store power when it’s cheap and sell it back to the grid at a higher price during peak demand periods.

The chargers are part of Ovo’s VCharge range which also includes powerful home batteries. These allow energy customers to store, use and sell electricity, whether or not they have their own roof-mounted solar panels or not.

Ovo boss Stephen Fitzpatrick said: “This is the first step in building the distributed energy system of the future."

He added: “We’re enabling thousands of [electric vehicle] batteries to help balance the grid in times of peak demand, more renewable energy to come onto the system, and households to reduce their electricity bills.”

The independent supplier said on Wednesday it will trial the "vehicle-to-grid" power systems across 1,000 of its customers who drive Nissan electric vehicles before they are made commercially available.