Amber Electric’s SmartShift Can Sync Your Loads To Wholesale Electricity Prices

Years ago when people first started talking about exposing consumers to the wholesale electricity price, I thought it was a bad idea as I felt most households weren’t up to the challenge of managing the risk of price spikes. So it was a happy experience for me to chat to Amber Electric co-founder and co-CEO Dan Adams, and hear that Amber’s solution to this is a guarantee their customers will save money over the course of a year.

Since I spend more time looking at technology than the retail market, I’m late to Amber Electric, but Dan and I were talking through the company’s SmartShift service, currently in beta in Adelaide.

For others who are in the position I was until Friday, Amber Electric ignores the traditional retailer model – buying electricity at the wholesale price, and buying financial hedges that let them turn the variable price into a fixed price for the householder. 

Amber Electric doesn’t “buy electricity” at all – the customer buys their power from Energy Locals – and what Amber does is expose the real time wholesale price to the customer, so they can shift their usage to cheaper times.

There’s currently no financial reason for customers to manage their usage according to the wholesale price, because you’re paying 35c per kWh (or whatever) no matter the upstream price (with the exception of the blunt instrument of off-peak water heating).

As an Amber customer, you watch the app on your phone and when the wholesale price falls, you power up the pool pump, aircon, water heater or the EV charger. And if the price is rising, you cut your usage. 

As well as the wholesale electricity price, the company’s app shows users the real-time percentage of renewables in the grid, and a renewables forecast over the next 12 hours.

As Dan told us, that model assumes a very engaged customer – and that’s what SmartShift is about.

“Our customers now are very engaged,”

he said, but for the Amber model to take off, it needs automation.

In the South Australian beta, Amber Electric is:

“optimising household batteries, hot water services, and pool pumps to use electricity when it’s getting cheaper; and to export power to the grid when the price is higher.”

With just hot water services and pool pumps under management, Amber believes it can save customers $150 to $200 over 12 months. When batteries are integrated into SmartShift, the company expects savings to increase by another $200 to $400 a year.

Get Ready For Automation

Amber Electric’s contribution is of course the computing infrastructure (including cloud-to-cloud integration between Amber and South Australian partner SolarEdge) that supports the app and provides the renewables forecasts to customers. 

“The objective of our algorithm is to minimise electricity costs, and maximise export price,” he said. “We have a fixed subscription fee of $10 / month, so our incentive is to have customers save as much as possible.”

A partnership with Ohmie provides the smart switches and smart plugs needed to control loads. Customers signing up to the Adelaide trial don’t need to buy the smart switches.

“We have an $800k grant from the SA Government so there’s no cost to the customer.”

“The pool pump needs to run a set number of hours a day, so we set it to run at the cheapest times. And it makes sense to heat up hot water during the cheapest two hours of the night, using excess wind when wholesale prices are cheap.”

SmartShift is already integrated with SolarEdge battery customers using LG Chem batteries, with Tesla Powerwall next.

“We’re just about to finish our integration with Tesla to make Powerwall and Powerwall 2 part of SmartShift”, Dan said.

Batteries are already compatible with VPP operations, and don’t need additional hardware or software. The next target for integration will be electric vehicles.

Original Source: https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/amber-electric-smartshift/