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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Octopus energy in the UK https://octopus.energy/octopus-smart-tariffs/ has a variety of different “smart” tariffs on offer from raw market price (Agile) to EV specific tariffs. I’ve been with them for years as they’re one of the few energy companies here that seem to have a clue and have been consistently cheaper than most of the competition. We do seem to have a much better energy market in the UK compared to the US, but the system is still pretty bad. (see the whole debacle about energy prices during the winter)

    I was in an odd situation last year of being on a cheap fixed import rate, but a market rate for export, and I was at one point being paid £1/kwh to export our solar and paying 26p for import. You can even be paid to use energy occasionally with the market rate tariff when the cost of energy flips negative.

    We’ve got a Powerwall too and can charge the battery at night and return it to the grid during peak hours. I don’t do that at the moment as the rates aren’t worth it for the tariff we’re on (Flux). Instead while it’s sunny we can just remain off grid and export our excess using the battery to cover the evening.

    I’d love for a way to drive the powerwall charge/discharge behaviour with an API, it would let me make the powerwall charge up when energy prices were lowest in any given 24h window and discharge our surplus when grid prices were at their highest. Tesla had a plan to do this (managed by octopus) but they shut it down earlier in the year, probably due to crazy winter we just had… I’d still prefer some control over it though as I have a better idea of what our usage could be if I want to intervene.