-
Want to remove ads? Register an account and login to see fewer ads, and become a Supporting Member to remove almost all ads.
Tesla Virtual Power Plant in CA
- Thread starter power.saver
- Start date
Are you saying "discharge" as in "discharge to grid"?
Or you are observing that the PW is in standby?
For me, yes I am exporting less right now than I would on a normal day because the PW would be absorbing the home loads.
Since sunset is at 7:25 there won't really be any Solar left after the event to export, so as long as the PW runs my home loads from 7:00 - 9:00 it's not a big deal.
I guess I would expect your export to be less since the system is trying to get the Powerwall SOC to 100% by that start of the event.
My PWs are full, and the excess solar been exporting as normal. I assume that once the event starts the export will increase to a combination of excess solar and Powerwall power.
Time to charge the EV or get the A/C down to 70
, but seriously don't do that just to get an extra few dollars.Powerwalls discharges into the house plus grid the amount that gets exported to the grid depends on the house load, the solar production, and your PTO maximum site export value.
Powerwalls in the VPP are in standby from 4:00-6:00pm and then they will discharge from 6:00-7:00pm and then they will go back to normal operating behavior. That discharge plus the solar production at that point will cover the house load and then anything extra goes to the grid. Each Powerwall will discharge up to a maximum of 5.0 kw/Powerwall or more likely less to not exceed the PTO maximum once solar production minus the house load is taken in to consideration.
Tesla did not take a percentage of the compensation last year and they aren't again this year. They are currently making money by offering this as a selling point to sell more Powerwalls and Tesla Solar products. Later they may take a percentage of the compensation for running the VPP.
I know Tesla can't program their products to be all things to all people; but in this case I'm doing LESS to support the grid from 4-6 in order to support it more for one hour.
The CPUC ELRP, Emergency Load Reduction Program, has a regulated $2/kWh price and we are getting the entire $2 and not say $1.75, so there isn't anything going to Tesla. I thought I saw something explicit about it, but I can't find it at the moment.
I agree, which is why I think that a bunch of people are going to be upset about this event. Maybe there is some rational behind it to understand the impact of Solar+ESS in the peak period. Still the pool is 2858 homes which roughly 3840 Powerwalls versions the ~25,000 PG&E customers with Powerwalls, so I don't know how much can be gleaned from rough 12% of the population.
yeah i agree, i just noticed this one basically lasts for an hour, in an hour where the powerwall is normally exporting, so this one will be worth $0 and will probably cost me since there was no export from 4-6pm.
should have opted out of this one, but didn't notice until now. i didn't get any kind of notification from the tesla app on my iPhone. what alerted me to it was a couple of notifications from the CA ISO app on my phone.
And how much solar are you generating right now along with the house load? Solar + 5kw - house should = maximum allowed site grid export.
Take a look at yesterday grid exports and you should basically see a flat line that is your maximum allowed export as defined by your PTO. If you log in to the gateway and click on the Summary link the Site Export Limit is the second from the bottom. Mine is 7.82 kW.
Last edited:
When I wrote "VPP controller" I was referring to some unknown Tesla software that exists only within Tesla corporate that processes the CAISO/CPUC/PG&E/SCE triggers for an ELRP event and then dispatches commands (charge, standby, discharge) to the Powerwalls that are opted-in to the VPP program.
The only visibility that we can see is what is the VPP tab in the Tesla app that covers the event timeline, what our equipment is doing, how many fleet homes there are participating and the aggregate kW charging/discharging.
Here is the PG&E VPP Fleet Home data that I collected for the 9/1 event that just concluded at 10 minute intervals. At 4:00pm when charging stopped it was at 1,165 kW, so not all Powerwalls were at 100%. The peak discharge was at 6:20pm at 20,853 kW with an estimated 20.8 MWh delivered during the event with 2,861 homes. At one point the homes was listed at 2,793 and at the end it was 2,791.
Can you make up for the lost export by turning on export everything for the rest of peak, or is your export limit so low that you can't dump the rest of the energy in the remaining time?
Thanks. I was wondering where you got the data, and now I understand. Appreciate you preparing the graphs showing what's happening.
maybe - i think i will be short an hour, usually depletes from 4-8pm, and tonight would be 6-9pm.
Yup, I have a very full 3 powerwalls because there was no home usage from 4 to 6 pm so I used all peak power at the highest price. I think what I'll do is just opt out of the 1 hour events.
Similar threads
