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got email describing VPP payout today
- Thread starter astrorob
- Start date
Set your reserve to 0%.
More extremely, turn off all breakers that you can except the ones that keep your powerwall/TEG connected to the grid so that you you zero power for your house during the event. Your frig should be fine for that period of time.
If I remember correctly, my reserve was set to 5%, but somehow it didn't export the max. Do I need to change energy exports from "solar" to "everything"? Not sure if I manually adjusted the TOU schedule and pricing caused it to export less during the VPP events.
Ha, I probably won't turn off all breakers.
As I understand it the compensation is based on the amount of energy your powerwall discharges during the event relative to the baseline discharge energy in the 10 equivalent days before the event. It does not matter if the discharge is going to the grid or your home during the event.
The only way to game it is to modify your powerwall usage during the baseline days but that would require knowledge that an event will occur 1-2 weeks ahead of occurrence. Running in self powered mode will decrease your baseline discharge since you will run off solar for part of the peak period.
Except that's not what actually happened. My payout was strictly based on the total kwh discharged to the grid and did not subtract the baseline. This is why our payouts were larger than we all expected....by quite a bit.
Thanks. I didn't see that was definitively answered in this thread, so I took a quick look at my data.
I received $275 which implies 137.5 kWh at $2/kWh. From the Tesla data my PWs discharged 135.7 kWh during the events and I exported 91.5 kWh to the grid (I was using lots of AC). At least with my data barring any excel errors it does not seem that they accounted for a baseline, but it does seem to be powerwall discharge only and not necessarily power to grid.
Yes that's correct. Reading my last reply I was slightly off when I said total power discharged to the grid when what I meant was total battery power discharged to the grid.
BTW, if they followed the previously stated policy of using the average over the a previous 10 day sliding window, you get penalized as the VPP season is during a time of year where every day has less and less post noon solar production so your average baseline will be more than your current baseline.
@sorka Your numbers worked out that way, but I have yet to see anyone else confirm the same.
This is not how the VPP compensation is documented to work and it definitely is not the way that it worked for myself. For those that used the spreadsheet that I created the compensation is a bit higher than the spreadsheet calculates. I wish I could reconcile it, but I have been able to yet.
@KHYE If you want maximum compensation from VPP events then you need to do the following.
First, on the event day change your reserve to as low as you feel comfortable with (I went with 5%) and after the event concludes raise it back up again
Second, minimize the amount of Powerwall discharge during the event hours for the baseline period (10 days for weekday, 4 days for weekend) before the event. This is obviously hard to do as you don't know when an event will be called and if you are a net consumer you want to avoid Peak imports as much as possible. As a net consumer, importing during peak doesn't matter as much to me, so I shifted my Peak period from 4:00-9:00pm to 7:00-9:00pm at first, but then when most of the events fell in this period I change my Peak to be from 4:00-6:00pm instead to get no discharge from 6:00-9:00pm.
As I posted up thread I was surprised to see that the energy discharged from the PWs during the event times matched closely with my compensation, 135.7 kWh discharged vs 137.5 kWh compensated for based on the $2/kWh rate. Maybe this is coincidental, maybe I have an issue with my computation, or maybe my baseline is low enough that it is within other uncertainties/unknowns in the calculation.
I have not pulled my baseline data as it is a pain to download it from the Tesla app, but looking at one typical day a few days before the events I discharged 2.2 kWh during peak (4-9 PM) and this would be rather typical for all days. I know the events varied in duration and didn't always line up exactly with peak hours, but I would still expect my baseline over the 8 events I participated in would total ~10-15 kWh which would further widen the discrepancy between my calculation and compensation.
Anyway just another data point.
I think that is likely a coincidence and it also isn't the same as what @sorka has been saying which is that is the amount that went to the grid during the event.
In my case during the 10 events my two Powerwalls discharged 193.16 kWh which should have been good for $386.32, but my check was $332.97. If I look at what went to the grid during that time it was only 139.69 kWh which would be $279.38.
Edit: Looking at my particular case my calculations with the baseline came to 158.27 kWh and $278.99, which is $53.99 less than the check I received. That is the equivalent of 26.99 kWh with rounding that is 27 kWh or a bonus 1 kWh for every event hour. Not saying that is what happened, but sometimes you can make data do what ever you want it to do.
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Thanks for the suggestions. Yea, timing the VPP events is challenging. I'm a net producer, since I overized my system.
If I understand correctly, by setting the backup reserve for PW to highest amount (close to 100%) should minimize the discharge, right?
I'm a net producer too since I added another 4.8 kw but hopefully that will change once I've done my heat pump conversions. New hybrid water heater getting installed this weekend which will increase energy usage some (replacing propane). But still way oversized until I get the HVAC replaced with mini splits.
Right, the higher your reserve level the less the system will discharge during Peak. It just feels wrong to me to not discharge during Peak, so I have mine set to 85% in the summer and 95% in the winter with the Peak period shorten to just 4:00-6:00pm. If there is a VPP event from 6:00-9:00pm then my baseline would be 0 kWh and I would get compensation for 100% of the discharge. Also, with the lower discharge the efficiency loss is lower and more kWhs are exported to the grid to be compensated for on my annual true-up and these kWhs have no TOU (TOE Time Of Export?) component.
aesculus
Still Trying to Figure This All Out
I can't make my payment out no matter how I slice and dice it. I guess I will wait for more people to weigh in.
this is a good idea, but my 2x powerwall system is clamped at 5kw since that's my inverter's nameplate power. so i would only be able to dump 10kwh every day if i set up like this. there was a short period of time when i first turned on EE where my system would put out 10kw but it must have been a bug.
maybe it's worth doing around the weeks that these grid emergencies seem to happen though.
I'm only suggesting that for net producers, if you are a net consumer then you likely need to avoid Peak altogether and the Export Everything can help as well to get you to a near zero NEM balance.
Does anyone think since this VPP is sorta new, they are just offering full discharge compensation vs. difference between the normal 10 day average discharge?
Companies do this all the time to generate interest in a new offering, etc...
If folks got really small checks, less people would bother with these VPP programs (or if there were actual outages and the grid was less reliable, less folks would jump on board).
charlesj
Active Member
Looking at my notes I see they drew 4 kWh increments as I have one day with only 4 kWh drawn for 1 hour, one for 8 kWh, and most went 3 hours at 4 kWh per hour.
We have one PW, and we just deposited out VPP check for $142.70. My export to the gird during VPP event hours was ~72.775 kWh, which at $2 would be $145.55. Close enough to conclude that our export to the grid during the VPP events is what was compensated.
Method: downloaded Tesla App data for the VPP dates, totaled the grid exports during the event hours. Each 5 minute data point is rounded to the nearest .1kWh, so a bit of cumulative error is to be expected, hence the ~kWh. It was kind of a pain to sroll back to those dates, download as CSV, import to excel, block out the relevant periods for each event day. Hipper probably would be to use the API, load into an SQL database, join with the VPP periods, divide by 12 (due to 5 minute data samples) sum, multiply by $2. Next time maybe, if I ever learn SQL. Or better, just have Telsa give us a proper detailed account statement.
The VPP periods all started after our solar production had stopped. So the export to the grid was PW discharge less house consumption when the net grid flow was negative, i.e. grid export.
As for the prior baseline days, most of my "export everything" happens during the first hour, 4-5 pm, and PW covered the house then so the baseline grid flow is zero and so would not have mattered.
Anyway, it is pretty cool to get a check from Tesla/PG&E. Ironic though that while I waited for the check which proved that solar+batteries is hugely beneficial to all the non-sola PG&E customers., PG&E was (successfully) lobbying to kill solar by lying about how NEM works, and conflating lost revenue with cost shifting.
SW
aesculus
Still Trying to Figure This All Out
It was a total PITA to get the data that way. It would have been bad enough if we could have just gone to the date but had to scroll backwards by day until we got there. Tried going to the month or week and it just reset to today when I then selected Day.
My payout was $214.91 and the closest I could get was to take the total discharges to the grid during the events and subtract any solar I generated during the same time. That netted me $209.78, which maybe is close enough.
Note: I did not participate in the first 2 days of the event and my solar and grid discharge match for those two days so a net of 0kW.
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