Anybody have direct experience with Amber Electricity?

[Vostok]

I’ve noticed this week Amber being a bit more aggressive in discharging my battery to the grid when export prices are high… but it’s mostly getting it wrong unfortunately.

Three times it has discharged during the evening peak (5-6:30pm) when export prices were 58c/kWh or higher. Sounds great… except the problem is that grid rates in NSW at the moment are elevated (usually more than 60c/kWh) from about 3pm to 8pm. At this time of year, my battery ceases filling by 3pm, so my battery is already depleted below 70% before grid export even starts.

So the result is, after about 30 minutes of peak grid export, my battery is down below 30%, and I am almost certain to run out of battery between 6:30 and 7:30 (especially if we turn the AC on ‘cos it’s cold), and then pay those high grid rates.

So Amber is selling my electricity for 30 minutes at 58c/kWh, but I then have to buy it back at 60 to 70c/kWh for up to 90 minutes. I come out behind! I’d be better off not selling at 58c/kWh.

I don’t know how others have gone with this kind of thing, but for me, I suspect battery discharge to the grid will only be a financial positive for me if the export price is much, much higher, like a few dollars per kWh. I need to stop Amber selling below that.

I’ve had only one day so far where I’ve made money, and that’s when export prices hit $7/kWh for a 30-minute period.

 

[Jules22]

I’ve noticed this week Amber being a bit more aggressive in discharging my battery to the grid when export prices are high… but it’s mostly getting it wrong unfortunately.

Three times it has discharged during the evening peak (5-6:30pm) when export prices were 58c/kWh or higher. Sounds great… except the problem is that grid rates in NSW at the moment are elevated (usually more than 60c/kWh) from about 3pm to 8pm. At this time of year, my battery ceases filling by 3pm, so my battery is already depleted below 70% before grid export even starts.

So the result is, after about 30 minutes of peak grid export, my battery is down below 30%, and I am almost certain to run out of battery between 6:30 and 7:30 (especially if we turn the AC on ‘cos it’s cold), and then pay those high grid rates.

So Amber is selling my electricity for 30 minutes at 58c/kWh, but I then have to buy it back at 60 to 70c/kWh for up to 90 minutes. I come out behind! I’d be better off not selling at 58c/kWh.

I don’t know how others have gone with this kind of thing, but for me, I suspect battery discharge to the grid will only be a financial positive for me if the export price is much, much higher, like a few dollars per kWh. I need to stop Amber selling below that.

I’ve had only one day so far where I’ve made money, and that’s when export prices hit $7/kWh for a 30-minute period.

Sounds like it's still adapting to your usage patterns etc. I'd definitely be overriding it in these situations if you can.

 

[Vostok]

I just made my first intervention… Amber was starting to grid-charge my battery on the basis that grid electricity was “cheap”. But 18c/kWh isn’t that cheap. Also, it’s going to be sunny all day in Sydney today. My house battery will get full by itself soon enough at 0c/kWh - so grid charging at 18c/kWh is stooopid.

Also filling the house battery now is a dumb idea - it would mean I’d be exposed to negative FITs from 11am. My car is at 90% SoC so not much soak left there. And while I’ve enrolled my inverter with Amber to do solar curtailment when FITs are negative, that is not operational yet.

So I hit the “control my battery” button for the first time and went into self-consume mode for the next hour. Grid charging has stopped.

I’ll provide condensed feedback to Amber after I’ve been with them for a few months on where I think their algorithms stuff up. I’m starting to think Amber should allow users to set “guard rails” for certain actions, e.g. a minimum sell price for grid exports.

 

[cafz]

@Vostok forecast prices also look very mild for NSW this evening (at this point!) so you might even want to go grid powered this evening and save that stored energy for tomorrow.

 

[Jules22]

I’ll provide condensed feedback to Amber after I’ve been with them for a few months on where I think their algorithms stuff up. I’m starting to think Amber should allow users to set “guard rails” for certain actions, e.g. a minimum sell price for grid exports.

Yeah I find that the interventions help to let it learn your individual situation.

I was doing them heavily in the early days but rarely need to now.

I also agree I'd love to see the ability to set a never charge below price and only discharge above price.

As part of the EV alpha program I get the opportunity to set up calls with the developers and those are a couple of things I'm going to suggest.

 

[Vostok]

Well I've now been with Amber for a month and have received my first bill.

• My total average cost per kWh was 29.6c. That is the total of my bill, with all usage charges, credits, discounts and Amber charges included, divided by total grid kWh purchased.
• This price is 17% higher than the cost per kWh with my previous provider in the most recent quarter.
• I've had only 1 day out of 31 where I actually made money.
• I purchase 100% GreenPower at 5.98c/kWh (which is added to the wholesale rate) - more than the 2.8c/kWh I was paying. GreenPower represented 20% of my Bill with Amber, but only 11% of the bill with my previous provider in the previous quarter.
• Amber told me that the GreenPower charge is not included in the realtime wholesale prices they show in the App, nor the daily cost summary they show in the App.
• The daily connection fee with Amber is 89c/day, compared to the $1.06/day previously - 12% of the bill with Amber, but 20% of the bill from my previous provider.
• Overall, the lower daily connection fee plus higher 100% Green Power fee almost exactly match the costs I had with my previous provider - it's a wash.
• Therefore, the difference has been that my average usage cost per kWh with Amber has been significantly more than with my previous provider.

In fact, extrapolating this month's bill to a full quarter would make this the most expensive electricity bill I've had on a per-kWh basis since early 2019 - prior to having solar.

The experiment will continue but I must say I am struggling to understand how a wholesale-price pass-through model could end up costing me significantly more than a ToU tariff with a major. It really is difficult to explain how that is possible, since the majors add profit margins to their tariffs.

The only thing I can think of is that Amber's "SmartShift" doesn't factor in that I'm paying a 100% GreenPower surcharge, therefore the buy-sell spread needs to be 6c/kWh higher for me than for customers who are not buying 100% GreenPower. That's because grid charging the battery costs me not just the current wholesale price, but the wholesale price plus 6c/kWh. Whereas the sale of electricity is just at the current FIT.

So I suspect Amber is grid charging my battery at a price which it later sells below the cost of charging - meaning Amber is costing me money in doing that transaction, not making me money. But that alone is probably not sufficient to explain the 17% higher cost.

I will have to raise this with them.

 

[Borgy]

Well I've now been with Amber for a month and have received my first bill.

Picked the WORST month to sign up. Yes Amber will be more than retailers for winter. The other 9 months is a different story.

 

[Max Spaghetti]

Picked the WORST month to sign up.

Maybe...

However, I did the same experiment for 12 months (ending 12 months ago), to even out the seasons. I did not pay extra for green power, nor have solar or battery. I merely bought and consumed power.

It cost me considerably more with Amber (about 50% more, averaged over 12 months). As with your comparison, the daily fee pretty much cancelled out the Amber premium, so it was all about the kWh charge. Which to me meant that other retailers would have actually lost money on me during that 12 month period. I found that hard to believe also. Something wasn't adding up (unless the retailers actually did go backwards in my distribution area over that period, which is possible because retailers did increase their prices shortly thereafter also, but not by that magnitude - about 20% I think).

But distribution areas vary wildly too, so I don't want my experience to put anyone off having a good look at Amber. And being able to arbitrage prices with solar and battery should, in theory, make it work better. When I quote with Amber right now, adding solar gives me nothing in their estimate (in fact -0.2c/kWh average FIT). Adding solar+battery gives me an estimated $800/year saving, so not worth it. This is VIC.

The only thing I can think of is that Amber's "SmartShift" doesn't factor in that I'm paying a 100% GreenPower surcharge, therefore the buy-sell spread needs to be 6c/kWh higher for me than for customers who are not buying 100% GreenPower. That's because grid charging the battery costs me not just the current wholesale price, but the wholesale price plus 6c/kWh. Whereas the sale of electricity is just at the current FIT.

I must admit that I don't understand green power surcharges in the Amber context. If you buy power at a low wholesale rate but with a 6c "green power" surcharge, and then resell it at a higher rate, you surely should have the same 6c "green power" surcharge added to your sell price - the electricity is still green when you feed it back in. Or is all residential feed in already automatically assumed to be green power given that most people feed in solar, so it's already priced in that way in the wholesale market?

I never watched the Amber FIT because I didn't have solar/battery, but I'm interested to know: Is the Amber wholesale FIT always set at a fixed offset to purchase tariff (the difference being the various grid charges per kWh?) Right now my Amber app says 17c BUY vs 1c SELL, so 16c of grid charges in there which is about what the breakdown adds up to on the Amber website for all the different grid charges (including their hedging and carbon neutral offset). That would mean wholesale BUY would need to increase to 33c to break even on SELL, plus 6c more than that if you are buying green power, then plus a significant margin more than that to be bothered feeding in at all. Otherwise might as well keep it in the battery and use it later.

 

[Vostok]

It cost me considerably more with Amber (about 50% more, averaged over 12 months). As with your comparison, the daily fee pretty much cancelled out the Amber premium, so it was all about the kWh charge. Which to me meant that other retailers would have actually lost money on me during that 12 month period. I found that hard to believe also. Something wasn't adding up (unless the retailers actually did go backwards in my distribution area over that period, which is possible because retailers did increase their prices shortly thereafter also, but not by that magnitude - about 20% I think).

Yes something doesn’t add up. Amber have wholesale price pass-through with zero mark-up. The majors have ToU rates which are a concoction of what they believe the wholesale rates will average out at different times of the day, plus a significant profit margin. The majors also have pitiful FIT.

So it is really hard to understand how Amber ends up costing more on a per-kWh basis. Unless, of course, I managed to timeshift my usage with the majors (using my battery) in such a way that I was costing them money, and was effectively being subsidised by all their customers who are unable to do that. I managed to shift over 80% of my usage to offpeak. But for this theory to hold, that would also require the majors to be selling offpeak electricity below cost, which seems implausible.

I must admit that I don't understand green power surcharges in the Amber context. If you buy power at a low wholesale rate but with a 6c "green power" surcharge, and then resell it at a higher rate, you surely should have the same 6c "green power" surcharge added to your sell price - the electricity is still green when you feed it back in. Or is all residential feed in already automatically assumed to be green power given that most people feed in solar, so it's already priced in that way in the wholesale market?

No, GreenPower surcharge is never added to exports - it is a one-way grid cost that forces retailers to buy the quantity of kWh that you consume from a renewable generator. So they need contracts in place to cover it, and the 100% GreenPower surcharge varies between retailers depending on what type of contracts they have struck. Part of the GreenPower fee is also used to cover the cost of administering the GreenPower scheme, i.e. accrediting generators and auditing the scheme over time (so there’s no dodgy business going on).

Adding 6c/kWh in one direction really does make the buy-sell spread extremely problematic. Amber was already getting it wrong a few times last month (buying at a price that was higher than what it could sell that electricity for only a few hours later), adding 6c/kWh on the input cost just made that so much worse.

But as per my OP, while this contributed to the higher cost, it doesn’t fully explain it. I think the other reason is the midnight to 6am rate in Amber never fell below about 21c from what I can see, and typically sat in the 22-24c range. That is more than the 19c I was paying with a major. With 80% of my usage being pushed to those hours, I was baking in higher costs from the start.

 

[Jules22]

Yes something doesn’t add up. Amber have wholesale price pass-through with zero mark-up. The majors have ToU rates which are a concoction of what they believe the wholesale rates will average out at different times of the day, plus a significant profit margin. The majors also have pitiful FIT.

So it is really hard to understand how Amber ends up costing more on a per-kWh basis. Unless, of course, I managed to timeshift my usage with the majors (using my battery) in such a way that I was costing them money, and was effectively being subsidised by all their customers who are unable to do that. I managed to shift over 80% of my usage to offpeak. But for this theory to hold, that would also require the majors to be selling offpeak electricity below cost, which seems implausible.



No, GreenPower surcharge is never added to exports - it is a one-way grid cost that forces retailers to buy the quantity of kWh that you consume from a renewable generator. So they need contracts in place to cover it, and the 100% GreenPower surcharge varies between retailers depending on what type of contracts they have struck. Part of the GreenPower fee is also used to cover the cost of administering the GreenPower scheme, i.e. accrediting generators and auditing the scheme over time (so there’s no dodgy business going on).

Adding 6c/kWh in one direction really does make the buy-sell spread extremely problematic. Amber was already getting it wrong a few times last month (buying at a price that was higher than what it could sell that electricity for only a few hours later), adding 6c/kWh on the input cost just made that so much worse.

But as per my OP, while this contributed to the higher cost, it doesn’t fully explain it. I think the other reason is the midnight to 6am rate in Amber never fell below about 21c from what I can see, and typically sat in the 22-24c range. That is more than the 19c I was paying with a major. With 80% of my usage being pushed to those hours, I was baking in higher costs from the start.

Yeah, FIT's are definitely down at the moment compared to averages per below, but my usage charges are also down too. Still managing to get a healthy profit most days with the significant delta between usage and FIT (Just nowhere near as big as previous seasons), but I guess it depends on where you are.

My history seems to suggest a big payday about every 6 weeks (anything from $80-$500), usually with a few $20-30 days spread out through each month, but haven't had any of those 20-30's through the last couple of months, but did have my biggest payday of ~$500 profit about 6 weeks ago. Hopefully another big day coming up soon, but even if I limp through winter only making a dollar or two a day, I know it'll be better once the sun returns.