Having your cake and eating it too — Evnex and Amber make the perfect Victoria (solar) sponge
You might be forgiven for assuming that the wholesale electricity market in Australia is a financial instrument designed to funnel money from the consumer into the pockets of Big Energy. Retailer competition was expected to manage market risk and provide lower prices for homeowners, but in practice there hasn’t really been very much they can compete on (except garishness of brand colour palette) so this hasn’t happened.
Recently the regulatory bodies have been encouraging innovation, resulting in a proliferation of confusing tariffs which make it impossible to pick the best one for your personal electricity consumption profile. At the same time, volatility in the market has dramatically increased, meaning that sometimes energy costs your retailer $19 / kWh, while at others it gets paid 27c for every kWh you use. This is an insanely risky environment to trade in, so naturally retailers push market risk onto their customers wherever they can get away with it (for which I blame the regulators - the retailers are just behaving rationally within the rules they’ve been given).
This may all seem terribly depressing, so how do we get back to the cake I promised in the title? And what on earth does this have to do with our smart EV chargers?
Enter Amber Electric.
Two cups of Aussie innovation
Amber is an electricity retailer with a difference (albeit still one with a garish colour palette). They provide their customers direct access to the wholesale electricity market, and don’t earn a cent from the energy bought or sold. Instead they simply charge a flat monthly subscription fee.
Your spidey-senses may be tingling thinking that this exposes their customers to the entire market risk — and you’d be right! Luckily that monthly subscription fee doesn’t just buy you market access, it also provides you a suite of tools to help you manage your consumption (of electricity, not cake) thereby minimising costs and maximising returns.
Have solar? Amber’s platform can automatically curtail generation when the feed-in tariff goes negative. Got a battery? Amber will charge it up when the price is low and sell the energy when the price is high. Use a phone? Annoy your friends by checking the live price every five minutes and turning on/off hungry appliances. Have a Home Energy Management System and a degree in software engineering? You can fetch current and forecasted prices from the Amber API (Application Programming Interface) and schedule your oven to bake a cake at the cheapest time.
A dollop of Kiwi ingenuity
Of course if you drive an EV you’ll be aware that about a third of the electricity you buy for your home goes towards charging your car. And if you don’t own an EV then why have you read this far? It should be obvious by now that this isn’t a cooking blog and you aren’t going to get a great cake recipe out of it.
Getting the best out of Amber will entail plugging everything together and teaching your charger how to behave, which might sound daunting. And expensive if you make a mistake and accidentally charge at full speed during a price spike.
If you have a Tesla (or supported charger) then Amber has got you covered here with one of their smart tools. They can manage when and how fast you charge, and ensure this is optimised alongside your home battery.
We wanted to take the effort and risk out for owners of Evnex chargers too, but we manage charging off solar excess a bit differently from other chargers, so instead we rolled our own solution — leaving you free to get back to baking.
Amber customers just need to link Evnex to their electricity price feed, set a couple of target thresholds, and plug their car in. We’ll automatically ensure you charge at the best possible prices, and stop charging whenever there’s a spike. You can even tell us to only charge when you’ll get paid to do so (though you should probably only do this over summer because in winter it doesn’t happen very often).
Mix with some actual retail competition
If you think this sounds like an excellent recipe for cheap charging then we agree! And it makes Evnex with Amber a very compelling option for Australians.
But other retailers are experimenting with some alternative approaches. AGL and Origin have plans with very cheap charging either during specific hours or at times which they manage. Ovo has a free window across the middle of the day. So you can have your cake with them too. Their feed-in tariffs don’t give you the full upside of selling during a wholesale price spike (i.e. you don’t get to eat your cake) — but on the flip side you’re protected from price spikes, which for some people is more important.
In other words, there is finally some meaningful innovation going on within the retail electricity market in Australia. It’s not just a matter of whether you want your bill to be blue or pink or orange; depending on your usage and risk profile there are some great deals to be had by choosing the right tariff for your home.
Bake in the Victoria sun for three five-minute settlement intervals
(Other Australian states are available but weren’t named after a famous cake.)
At Evnex, we have a vision that every journey is powered by clean, affordable energy. And that means adapting charging times to achieve that goal.
By exposing the wholesale prices to their customers, Amber have put the cheapest possible times within drivers' reach — instead of being masked behind static price bands. Evnex can then automatically grab those sweet cheap kilowatt-hours for you without the risk of being bitten by a price spike. Which leaves you more money to spend on cake.
Learn more about charging with Amber and Evnex.
