Nice to see the thread is going along and a bit more general.
I’ve now been on Amber in Victoria since maybe November last year, here’s a bit of an update:
- I am still about $25 in credit at the moment. The vast majority of the year’s credit was the outage from the storms in Victoria earlier this year. During “normal operation”, it is about neutral or slightly in credit during the summer periods and will be in debit over the winter months (although the $300 from the budget will top up the finances).
- I have found that our completely electric household (2 x EVs, batteries, air con/heating etc) makes the options to charge cars at cheaper times highly effective. We do have a swim spa, which consumes a truck load of power (about the same as the rest of the household minus EVs), so I reckon if we didn’t have that indulgence, we’d easily be in credit.
- There are often a few hours in the summer where we were paid quite some attractive rates to consume energy. This can be a bit fickle, and you can miss it, but it was usually around 12-3 pm on really hot days over summer.
- Amber are continually working on their model - a lot of the reason I was struggling to put credit into the account over summer was the quite negative FITs (as it is wholesale) of maybe -5 c/kWhr to -10 c/kWhr. Amber have gone into a partnership(?) with a mob (Voltello) that have a pretty cheap wifi gadget that can detect the negative FIT and then reduce the load to the household requirement. Because my inverters are Fronius and batter is Tesla, the interface isn’t perfect (it doesn’t know that I still have space to fill in the battery), but they’re working on a native Tesla API I think. I could also stump up for a Fronius smart meter to make it seamless, but I think I’ll wait because this won’t generally be an issue until the spring, and they’re quite nimble with their development so I expect they’ll have this sorted shortly anyway.
- In Victoria (vs. what I see some YouTubers say in Sydney), over a long term, I will likely be struggling to make back the fixed network fees + Amber charge on a month-to-month basis, but probably will have a few high-value events that will top up the account. So on balance, my year-on-year costs will be zero.
So, overall, using EVs, running a full household on electricity and some smarts around buying and selling power from the battery gives me effectively zero yearly operating costs.
With the Amber improvements to the Tesla API, it will be much better for a fully M3/MY + 2xPW house, and I think that there are some further improvements that they could do for the AI around buying and selling power during this time of year (it sees a 12-hour expensive price, buys power, and then by the time the price comes around, it is a lot less, and so you now just have expensive power),
So, overall, I will definitely be sticking with Amber to see how it goes for the rest of the year. I really hope they are making money, because I really, really like the startup nature of the company, the constant improvements, and even (I suspect) that they could get some revenue streams by getting interest etc. on the money in credit.
The thing that would make this go gangbusters is V2G. I have seen a very nice, probably safe, but illegal set of instructions to get a V2L car like a Hyundai or Kia to trickle feed the battery via installing a further inverter to fake it being a solar panel. If this worked, or the US-style Cybertruck PowerShare thingy all worked, it could seriously assist with stabilising the power grid.
.
ha ha.
but it has limited capacity and apparently there are some issues with it at the moment according to Amber, partly contributing to the supply constraints in NSW.
