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Comment by saltspork

2 days ago

In Australia 5 minute spot pricing is now accessible to many residential customers via retailers like Amber electric. With volatile pricing and a large home battery subsidy from the re-elected government, batteries can quickly pay for themselves through arbitrage alone.

EMHASS is an interesting tool to perform the optimisation.

Yep, been using EMHASS for the last couple of years in the UK.

I have a large array (12.8kWp east/west split) but a low export limit of 5kW. In the winter it's charging overnight at 7p per kWh (Intelligent Octopus Go) and then using that stored energy during the day to avoid importing at peak rates, and in the summer it makes sure to discharge most of the battery before the peak generation hours so that battery charges from power which would otherwise be curtailed (discharge to minimise import on my SolarEdge system, but charge from clipped power would also work).

Similarly in Europe; spot market with a big single pay-as-cleared spot auction for every quarter-hour, and then a continuous auction for the same periods closer to delivery, similar to the normal stock market. Millions of residential devices are traded there right now