Adjust charge rate based on real-time pricing

ngardiner / TWCManager

Control power delivered by a Tesla Wall Charger using two wires screwed into its RS-485 terminals.

The Unlicense

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Adjust charge rate based on real-time pricing #115

Open ngardiner opened 4 years ago

ngardiner commented 4 years ago

Based off of Amber: https://www.amberelectric.com.au/pricing

The idea is that instead of increasing/decreasing based on green energy generation, the charge rate could be increased/decreased based on proximity to a target maximum real-time wholesale price. This is more a generic concept rather than an actual implementation as amber do not yet have an exposed API, but a module template to do this would be useful as I am sure there are similar platforms globally.

AndySchroder commented 4 years ago

How frequently do you expect to adjust the charge rate?

ngardiner commented 4 years ago

This particular provider changes the rate based on the prevailing wholesale rate for a given region on an hourly basis, although I could certainly foresee cases where the rate would be more real time than that, so it might be a matter of leaving polling interval to the individual interface

MikeBishop commented 4 years ago

IIRC, I saw a thread on Reddit where the provider gave pricing in 5-minute increments, published an hour in advance.

ngardiner commented 4 years ago

What I am thinking as a starting point would be to add a module class (Pricing) which then obtains real-time pricing data from an API interface. Generally I would expect the two key values of interest would be Import and Export prices, with a cent per kWh rate for each. Since this involves currencies there is every chance it could be much more complex than I am envisaging, but the idea would be:

Track the import and export pricing
Make this available to the policy rules

Two examples of where this could be useful:

Reduce / stop charging rate as export rate rises (more efficient to export than to consume)
Reduce / stop charging rate for non-green energy as import rate rises

In some instances, the import rate has the capability to rise into the dollars per kWh range where grid demand is beyond supply. In such a case there could be a cut-off where we just stop communicating with all slaves to ensure no charging occurs during the excessive pricing period.

mattclar commented 4 years ago

I use amber and adjust my charging based on pricing... They also helpfully give a green-yellow-red rating on the current price vs upcoming prices. I can show you how I query their api

ngardiner commented 4 years ago

Hi @mattclar - I'd certainly be interested in knowing more about interacting with the Amber API. It might make for a good framework as more providers offer flexible rates and real time APIs

mattclar commented 4 years ago

@ngardiner honestly it's really just a hack that I've reverse engineered! Hopefully they are working on a real API

mattiasclaesson commented 3 years ago

This is something that would be nice to get in place!

My provider tibber has this api to query for past, todays, tomorrows prices. Each hour has a dedicated price. https://developer.tibber.com/docs/overview They buy and sell at this same price.

There is a integration for home-assistant also https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/tibber/

ngardiner commented 3 years ago

I'll take a look, @mattiasclaesson. Thanks for the API reference!