Energy Manager Overview

Energy Manager is a Home Assistant-based energy management optimisation system that can be controlled both manually and automatically. When automation is enabled, Energy Manager will intelligently charge and discharge your battery to reduce your costs, and it will also automatically trade your energy to maximise your return on investment of your solar and battery system.

Energy Manager consists of two components:

1. A selection of Home Assistant-based entities that measure your energy system (inverter, solar generation, power usage, import/export status, etc.) via Modbus and select Home Assistant integrations and add-ons.
2. A connection to Energy Manager servers where intelligence and decision logic is performed on your data to provide the best customised instructions for your Home Assistant device to follow, based on the information that your system provided to the Energy Manager servers.

Component 1: Home Assistant

The first of the two components, your Home Assistant instance, is free to be used by anyone. Home Assistant is built on the Apache2 licence, meaning that it is free to be used and modified for any purpose.

Features of the client-side Energy Manager [FREE]

The following are features of the client-side Home Assistant, which are all free to use whether you decide to use the second component (see below) or not.

• Solar curtailing - When you have excess solar generation (i.e., your battery is full and you can't use all the power generated yourself) and the sell price on the wholesale market is negative, solar curtailment will automatically restrict your exports, saving you from being charged to export.
• Current pricing - Current buy and sell pricing, as obtained from your electricity provider, are displayed.
• Forecasted pricing - Graphs of your predicted buy and sell pricing are provided.
• Energy Dashboards - Detailed dashboards showing what is going on with your energy management.
• Inverter controls - Manually charge/discharge your battery from/to the grid by changing a couple of drop-down boxes. Change your minimum or maximum state-of-charge through easy-to-use sliders. Is there bad weather coming? If so, easily set a reserved state-of-charge for if you lose grid connection (device dependent).
• Inverter status - Easily view your inverter status - is the battery charging or discharging, what level is your battery currently at? How much power are you currently drawing from the grid? How many kW is your solar system generating right now?
• Power Usage Profile - Displays a graph of your personal power usage profile. Shows the hours when you use the most power based on intelligently learning from your historical usage patterns. The learning takes into consideration the season and the changes to your habits over time.
• Weather forecasts - Taken from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, weather forecast displays are provided.
• Solar forecasts - Solcast is used to obtain solar forecasts for your specific location, updated multiple times per day. These are displayed in easy-to-understand gauges so you can see what the predicted solar is for your location for the coming week. This allows you to organise your energy usage - put the washing on today or tomorrow? Is it best to do that power-hungry cooking today or not?
• Costs - Based on sensors measuring import and export costs, indicative usage graphs are provided (note, this is an estimate from the system, not from your electricity provider - the final price will always be set by your electricity provider).
• Updates - Updates to the Energy Manager software installed on your Home Assistant device are easily performed, with a simple update button.

Component 2: Energy Manager servers

The second of the two components consists of connectivity to the Energy Manager servers. These servers intelligently analyse the data from Home Assistant and send back the best decisions to optimise your energy and save (or make) you money.

The Energy Manager server's primary purpose is to provide the smarts to intelligently manage and trade your energy. The following are taken into consideration when calculating the best decisions to provide your Home Assistant device:

• Price Spikes - Monitor for buy and sell price spikes and automatically discharge your battery when the price that you have personally set is met.
• Price Spike Preparation - Monitor the price forecasts and charge your battery up when a price spike is predicted. Applicable for both morning and evening price spikes. You get to decide what defines a price spike, and also what buy price you'd be willing to pay up to, to charge your battery up ready for the predicted price spike.
• Solar Forecast - How much solar is your specific solar array expected to generate from this point on, until it is no longer generating?
• Power Consumption - Based on your personal energy usage patterns, how much power is your household predicted to consume before your solar array stops generating for the day?
• Importing from the grid - Do you have enough solar generation to be self-sufficient today, or should there be a period during the day when your battery should be charged from the grid?
• Best time to charge - If there is a requirement to charge from the grid (generally because there is not enough solar today), when is the best time to do it? If it charges now, will it get cheaper later on? Energy Manager will take the future predictions into account when deciding when to charge. Why charge now if your prices are going to be cheaper later on?
• Export or charge? - Early in the morning, if your predicted solar generation is sufficient, it is better to export to the grid while the feed-in-tariff (FIT) is positive, than to charge your battery. You can charge your battery during the day when the FIT is negative. However, if there won't be enough solar generated to cover your own usage, it will charge the battery instead of exporting, because later in the day it is likely to cost more to import from the grid than you would have received from exporting in the morning.
• Import or discharge? - Sometimes it is better to import from the grid when the price is cheap. Even though you may have available power to use from your battery, it does actually cost you money to discharge your battery, in that a battery only has a finite number of charge/discharge cycles and deteriorates in performance over time (this is just the nature of batteries, like your mobile phone battery dies over time). If the import price gets too high, it is usually better to take from your battery than the grid.
• Demand periods - You should attempt to never import from the grid during a demand period. If you are on a demand tariff, then the battery should be your source of power. If you are not on a demand tariff but a Time-of-Use (TOU) tariff, then the current prices are used to decide whether you should import from the grid or use your battery (this will nearly always be from your battery).
• Negative Buy Pricing - If it is detected that the buy pricing is -$0.03 or lower (i.e., you get paid to import from the grid), then the inverter may be shut down so that you can make money by importing power (device dependent), but only outside of a demand period.
• Weather and Storm monitoring - What is the weather like today and tomorrow? Is there a lot of rain (meaning lots of clouds and low generation) or a storm coming? Should your Home Assistant restrict its export in anticipation of upcoming low generation? If there is a storm coming, should you not export or use your battery because your stored energy may be needed for a grid outage?
• EV Charging - The ability exists to schedule in daily periods to bypass the Energy Manager system and take all your power from the grid instead. Since it is not the best idea to drain your battery to charge your electric vehicle (since it drastically increases your battery charge/discharge cycles), you can schedule this in during the night, for example. The time period can be scheduled whenever you want, but note that energy management is completely disabled during this scheduled period.
• Safety features - If the electricity provider API or the Energy Manager API is detected as being down (this could be from your own internet outage, or a fault of the provider), Energy Manager will automatically turn on Self-Consumption mode, so that you do not import or export from/to the grid when prices or decisions are unknown. Note that the Energy Manager API servers are fully redundant to minimise the possibility of outages.
• Personalised Decisions - Energy Manager is not a one-size-fits-all, it will take your personalised settings and work out the best decisions based on your requirements. However, for this to be successful you may need to tweak your settings as you learn the relationship between your solar array size, battery size, power usage, season, etc.
• Customisation - You get to define how aggressive you want to be with your charging/discharging/importing/exporting. Energy Manager will work off your personal settings, which may be very different from other Energy Manager users. You set the prices you are willing to sell and buy at. You get to sell at a particular battery level. You can sell cheaper when the battery is full, but only let your energy go for higher prices when your battery level becomes low. Energy Manager is very customisable.

Free vs Premium Features

The below table outlines the differences between the free and premium plans.