Can someone explain tariff automation?

Might be a question just for staff but I would like to know how the algorithm works to charge and discharge on a tariff like agile? I know prices have just boomed again for tomorrow but the last few days there were a lot of negative prices. How does the algorithm decide to grid charge and grid discharge?

I would really like the ability to set my own price thresholds. I currently charge my 8.2 batt from the grid on Octopus Go. Ideally I when I go back to Agile I would really like the ability to set a charge from grid price of sub 5p, a discharge to grid of 25p and above and dynamic for the rest of the time. Would I have to set this on the octopus agile scheduler instead of the GE dashboard?

Just want to plan my next steps. I was on agile and not sure I was fully capitalising on it. I would like to automate it and stop touching it!

When you look at what charging has actually occurred on your system, what pattern does it show? You should be able to work out whats its doing from that.

I tried Octopus schedular in the early days. It was very unreliable and also very simplistic. I rapidly dropped that and just created my own. The GE battery.api provides all the required functionality to do that.

Own algorithm does more than just charging when price is below a threshold. Why? Take days where the price drops so goes below 5p but then continues to drop and may even go negative. If you just use a price threshold your battery could well be full by the time the lowest price is reached. In that case you will have charged at a higher cost that is optimal.

My algorithm....
1) Detemine how many slots are required to charge the battery to the required SOC.
2) Get all the slots prices from Octopus API and sort ascending.
3) Schedule as many 30 min charge periods as required via just in time scheduling (as the optimal periods may not be contiguous so the only way to have more than 1 is dynamic scheduling). For me to take to SOC 100% may be 6 slots over say 7 hours

I sucessfully automated all that before I left Agile for Go, at which time I scrapped it all and just used a simple timer ;-) In terms of planning, I knew I was always using the most cost effective charging slots, regardless of the price or the time. Price thresholds were irrelevent as I always used the cheepest, ragardless what they were.

So without knowing exactly how the GE algorithm works, which I am sure @Mickey (GivEnergy) will describe, you can do simple maths calculations for tariff comparisons now as a desk exercise. If only the cheepest slots are used to fill your capacity you can determine how much that is compared to other tariffs. Thats the best case you can achieve.

For export, which I don't do as I have FIT, the logic is simply inverted. Again the ability to change discharge rate is in the battery.api.

I appreciate some local hosting / coding is required to deliver this. I am sure the GE and Octopus SaaS solutions will do all this eventually, but if you dont want to wait it really is easy to do yourself and far more flexible for future use cases you havn't thought of yet.

It sounds like you are heading towards energy brokering ( buy cheep, sell high ). I am pretty sure the GE algorithms won't have all the logic for that as to do it right you need to also know when to 'hold' and by how much. If you include PV forecasts and domestic load predictions in that equation it is non trivial, but still very doable.

THALL

Hi there,

The implementation of the tariff automation is to set a timer to charge and discharge depending on the peak and off-peak prices. Our implementation just changes timers and it's made for customers that don't want to go through the experience of setting up the API with a one click automation button.

As we've been gathering feedback and information, we've decided to withhold on more automations until we can develop a workflow and UI that targets a larger audience since everyone has a specific tariff and its difficult to target specific tariffs for a larger audience. This will reflect in the work we do on the new portal.

But yes, everything Seye is discussing is a workflow for how we deal with Octopus' automations. If you want a better automation setup, there's nothing stopping you from developing your own using our APIs

Seye Thank you for all this. While do work as an IT Support Manager I do not code/program. I was hoping to use an existing tool, example the one for integrating myenergi zappi with Agile. It feels like Octopus and GE almost have this solution but not yet. I might have to try agile again when the sun stays out for longer.

I will be using the Octopus schedule from March onwards when I drop back onto Agile export ,hopefully when the solar starts producing again.
I used it last year for Agile import/export. I used it mainly on the half hour slots to export at the best price during certain times.
It had quite a few teething problems , but started to work well in July/August/September.
I moved back to Go/Seg at the end of September, so don't know if any further improvements have been made or if it still works. I don't code or anything, but feel this automation added even more value to the Givenergy system

Kevsla For me I see it as the best option to get the best rate electric overall. Once my solar is generating a constant 12kw a day I may switch back and try the schedule tool on standard mode. Might try the half hour system too when there is more sun, maybe set 6 to charge 12 to discharge? I dunno. But I will have a play now I understand it better.

THALL Yes, same here a few slots to charge up depending on the solar and set the discharge to suit. I could never get it to work on price points, so used the half hours slots. I going to look into whether an Economy 7 tariff is better suited now for the import, instead of Agile. Will monitor the prices for the next few months 👍

This might be a stupid question but what is the current variable standard rate? Ours is fixed at the moment at about 24p/kWh and was wondering what the variable is likely to be come aprils price rise.

29p per kWh with a quick money super market deal check at 6000kwh per year, 2 year fixed deal.

Makes the revised Go rate of 30p for peak rate seem pretty reasonable!

Thanks for that I was really looking for the variable rate. I can work it out as can work back from the typical usage cost. But was being lazy 🤣

To answer my own question, its about 21p/kWh. So, I'm currently overpaying by about 3p/unit but come april, if it does go up by about 50%, will be 6p better off and if it goes up again in October by another 25% will be about 10p better off.

I have loaded my tariff details via the app and have noticed you can enable it to charge batteries from 00:30-0430 BUT I have this enabled via the GivEnergy web browser ? Any preference or they both do the same?

in my tariff automation, there is no option for me to choose. How can I get the automation?