彭博：家庭光伏储能户利用动态电价套利获利

Hi, it's Akshhat. Solar panels and batteries are now in millions of homes. Last week, I wrote a feature story about how some of those homes aren't just cutting their energy bills, but making a side income trading electricity. I also spoke about it on the Big Take podcast. Take a listen.

Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news. Hey. Hey. How are you?

Good. How are you?

Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, too.

Aaron Wilks is a train driver who lives in a tiny village about an hour and a half outside of London in a home built in the 1960s.

A 1960s home with an air traffic control style energy system.

An air traffic control style energy system. What Aaron's describing is the way he monitors and trades a hot commodity from his house, his own electricity. Aaron is part of a growing number of vibe coding energy traders. People who produce energy at home using solar panels, store that energy using batteries, and then figure out when to use it and when to sell it back to the grid. Aaron does it all using that air traffic control system.

A piece of software on his tablet that shows a series of circles, kind of like those activity rings on an Apple Watch.

The idea of this was to show my partner what's going on right now and then what's going to happen in the future. So each ring represents something different.

One ring represents the power coming from the solar panels on the roof of his house.

If the battery is charging, it will spin a certain way. If the battery is discharging, it will then go the other way.

Another ring shows whether his house is importing energy from the power grid or exporting the energy he's generating at home to the grid. It's all colorcoded. Red tells him that the price of energy is high. Purple a little less so. Green means it's cheap, like right now. So, it's an indication to anyone in the house that let's get the laundry on, charge the car, start heating hot water up, and if you want to stick the air con on.

Aaron's built a sophisticated system that uses all this information to decide the best times of day to use or conserve his energy. And he says the strategy isn't just about saving money. It's also about supporting the power grid by providing extra energy in times of higher demand. and that can actually make him money.

If I had a bigger battery, I'd be able to export a lot more and there'd be a huge amount more opportunity there.

Home energy traders like Aaron operate with the same ethos that commodities traders follow. Buy low, sell high. But Bloomberg senior climate reporter and host of the Zero podcast, Ashot Rothy, says this doesn't look anything like a trading floor. You're not going to get those Hollywood scenes of I want the shares at this price. In the case of electricity trading, you're getting electricity prices for the next 24 hours, hour by hour or half an hour by half an hour.

And most of these people who take the agency of deciding to buy low and sell high are automating those decisions.

Aaron only makes about 5 to£10 a month right now, but he's hoping that amount will rise. And Oxshot has spoken with traders who've made a few hundred overnight using similar tactics. So, how exactly are they pulling it off? And could Aaron one day go from cutting down his bills to actually making real money?

That's the dream, isn't it?

I'm Sarah Holder and this is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, is the next hot trade electricity from your own home? We go inside a new class of energy trader that's taking more control over their bills and making money along the way and how those traders are navigating everything from volatile electricity prices to threats posed by climate change. So Ashra, you've been reporting on this phenomenon where regular old energy consumers are essentially becoming hobbyist energy day traders.

They're using new tools to track the price of energy and using that information to time their consumption and in some cases sell energy they're generating at home. Tell me more about how this works.

More and more people are getting solar panels and batteries at home. Sometimes they are generating power that is more than what the consumer is consuming at home or sometimes they're generating power at a time when it's already a grid choke up that there's too much solar power and so it's better for that consumer to rather than send that solar power on the grid actually store it in the battery that they have at home.

The thing that is an unlock here is really the pricing. the fact that you can now look at day ahead prices hour by hour, sometimes 30 minutes by 30 minutes, and then decide when to buy low, sell high. Essentially, do arbitrage, what expert traders do on a daily basis, but now do it with your home assets for electricity and make money on the side.

So, there's two components to this. There's using energy when prices are lower, buying energy when prices are lower, and selling when prices are higher. I mean, it seems like kind of similar to what folks already do in terms of timing their energy consumption to get lower prices, right? Utility companies encourage this. Run your dishwasher late at night or early in the morning, not during peak hours. Turn down your air conditioner when everyone's home from work.

Is this essentially the same idea? It is, but it's taking it one step forward because that off- peak on peak pricing that you're talking about has been in the system for some time now. Lots of countries have them. What we're talking about now is dynamic pricing by every hour, by every 30 minutes. And in those the prices can vary quite a lot. So there can be a 10x difference between the price. Sometimes, especially in places like Spain or California or Australia, prices go negative in the day, which is to say, the utility is paying you to use that electricity.

And so, you can then essentially use that to charge your battery, get paid to charge your battery, and then consume that electricity later for free.

What is actually behind this trend? What's changed that's made it possible for this new kind of trader to emerge? For all this new information to be out there and for homeowners and energy users to be able to act on that information.

Three things. One is the price of solar and batteries that have just come down so much that more and more people are able to afford to put them on their rooftops or in their garages. Second is access to these dynamic pricing from the utility. It is still not something that is widely common in the EU. It's now a regulation. All countries with utilities that have more than 200,000 customers have to have this pricing.

But it's not true in the US. Not all US utilities provide this kind of dynamic pricing. And then the third thing is having the technical tools even if you don't have the technical ability. So some of the day traders we talked about have used chat GPT to essentially vibe code an automation system that talks to all their electricity assets and takes prices from the grid and manages it for them in the background which is how they are able to not worry like day traders do and don't have the stress of a day trader.

In terms of like my knowledge in coding I have no knowledge. I don't know any languages. Aaron Wilks designed his home energy trading system using Chad GPT. He downloaded a free open-source software called Home Assistant, which allows the algorithm he's built to tell his devices, like his electric vehicle charger, when to turn on. It's all hooked up to a basic computer server. And because Aaron isn't a coder, he's had to put some trust in the AI agent.

And he says sometimes it gets things wrong. We have like a screen set up in our living room and I've sat there at periods and going why the hell is the car charging now? I know it's 5:00 in the evening. It's expensive. So immediately I pull out I have a chat with the agent and I go why is my car charging? And then it'll g