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Soliscloud
Smart Charge & Discharge Function
Background
Price Charging
In Europe there are many countries that exhibit a price disparity between export and import tariffs accompanied by variable electricity prices over time.
Customers seek optimal functionality from their PV systems to achieve the following objectives:
1: During periods of low electricity prices, the system has to be configured for a charging phase. This entails prioritizing
grid-based power sources, fully charging the batteries and giving priority to the loads.
2: Conversely, when electricity prices are high, the system has to transition into a discharge phase. During this period,
the battery only discharges, effectively minimizing the customer´s overall electricity costs.
Introduction
Solis identifies this system as:
Time-of-Use Electricity Pricing with Smart Charging and Discharging, or TOU-SCD in short.
It consists of 3 main components:
1: Time-of-Use Electricity Pricing:
Day-Ahead price is retrieved from a third-party electricity pricing trading platform (Nordpool & Octopus).
This allows the user to identify when electricity prices are high and when they are low.
Historically speaking, daytime and evening tariffs are high and midnight and early morning tariffs are low.
2: Develop charging & discharging strategies:
Charging strategy: set the energy storage device to charge during periods of low electricity prices, effectively reducing
costs.
Discharging strategy: set the energy storage device to discharge during high electricity price periods, maximizing
revenues.
Please note that if you are not compensated in your territory for feed-in electricity then you should set your system to
never discharge based on price.
3: Intelligent charging and discharging control:
Automatically manage charging & discharging behaviours by controlling energy storage devices through the SolisCloud
platform.
Territories
As of 16/08/2024 TOU-SCD is available for the following territories in Soliscloud www.soliscloud.com
Norway
Sweden
Finland
Denmark
Estonia
Latvia
Lithuania
Austria
Belgium
Germany
Luxembourg
France
The Netherlands
Poland
United Kingdom
Examples
Example 1 – Finland (Nordpool)
Example 2 – UK (Octopus)
Example 3 – Sweden (Nordpool)
Operation
1: Permission activation
Based on the assigned role and account privileges, it is possible to access the European tariff charts within the intelligent charging and discharging mode (TOU-SCD) function.
The status of TOU-SCD is set to “OFF” by default. To enable this feature, you can make a request in our online desk by creating a new ticket:
https://solis-service.solisinverters.com/support/home
*Note In the future we will look to activate this for all storage systems after a trial period.
2: Setting the threshold price
After permission for a specific plant is enabled, is possible to find the trends in electricity prices under the real-time power curve diagram in the “Overview” page. The default setting is OFF. Switch it to ON.
3: Disclaimer Agreement
After reviewing and accepting the disclaimer, you will gain access to the settings page, where you can configure the price threshold.
4: Example Setting Charging/Discharging Threshold
In the figure below if the real-time power price is lower than 3.5 SEK, power will be taken from the grid to charge the battery.
If the real-time power price is higher than 4.6 SEK, the battery will be discharged.
You can also set the priority of charging or discharging.
This graph below shows what it looks like after setting the price charging settings for selling and buying power.
Connect with Solis
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