What is energy trading and how does it work?
Trading is the process of selling or "trading" the solar energy that is stored in your battery at wholesale electricity market prices. This means that you are able to sell electricity from your battery back to the grid and potentially make more profit on top of your normal solar feed in rate.
As part of the VPP program, using our app or website, you are able to see the wholesale electricity market price in 5 minute increments in almost real time. Below is an example of what that will look like (website shown).
Here you can see what the electricity price is (A) at the time (B), how much charge is in your battery (C), how much of that capacity is available to sell (D) and the button for starting a trade (E).
There are two parties that can sell the energy from your battery and do a trade. The first party is yourself. You can initiate a trade at any time assuming there is sufficient charge in your battery. The second party is Discover Energy. We may initiate a trade on your behalf anytime we notice that the wholesale market conditions are particularly favourable and there is sufficient charge available in your battery.
When you (or Discover Energy) press the sell button, this triggers the trade to begin. Our smart program sends the instructions to your inverter to discharge the energy in your battery to the grid. Your battery will continue to discharge for a period (minimum 15 minutes to be successful) or until it reaches reserve levels (set by you installer or manufacturer) at which point, the battery will stop discharging energy into the grid.
Once the discharge is complete, our program calculates the 30 minute average market price for the discharge period and works out how much electricity was sold. It uses this information to then calculate how much profit you made on the trade. Successful trades will be displayed in the Transaction History. This profit is then paid to you on your next bill from Discover Energy. See the link here for more information about how the trading profit is calculated.
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