Hello to Victron administrators who monitor these forums.
I’m UK based who has a MP2 & Pylontech, grid tied ESS.
In the UK for a few months now, a new “energy market disrupter” company has started up -
Axle Energy - https://www.axle.energy/
Several UK energy suppliers have had pretty cutting edge Smart Tariffs for few years mainly being driven by Octopus Energy with solar tariffs such as Flux and intelligent EV tariffs, such as Octopus Intelligent Go, whereby Octopus Energy remotely control your home battery and EV charging on a daily basis. Other UK energy suppliers now offer similar tariffs which can be very lucrative.
For these tariffs, Octopus (and other suppliers) have worked with several battery manufacturers (Sigenergy, Tesla, Fox & Give Energy & others) along with many EV charger manufacturers to work seamlessly with these Smart tariffs.
There doesn’t seem to be any integration with any Victron based ESS or EV chargers - are you guys working with any of the UK energy suppliers on integration with these Smart Tariffs?
So back to Axle Energy - they are not an energy provider in the conventional sense - they operate as a business-to-business (B2B) software and virtual power plant (VPP) platform that connects domestic energy devices (EV chargers, home batteries, heat pumps) to electricity markets.
So, just in times of need to help balance the grid they use domestic customers ESS like ours as a large collective VPP. I think they guarantee something in the region of at least 4 grid support events per month and they have a couple of options on how you choose to let them control your battery storage.
The very big plus for joining this Axle Energy VPP scheme is that currently they pay £1 per kWh, (yes £1, it’s not a typo!) exported during a grid balancing session. In addition to this you will also receive your normal export rate from your regular energy provider, which in our case currently being on the Octopus Outgoing tariff would be an addition 12p per kWh.
Please watch this recent Gary Does Solar video which is an in-depth video about Axle Energy, the company and their grid balancing business model.
I know 2 people that have Give Energy and Sigenstore battery systems, who have both been signed up on the Axle Energy scheme for a few months now and are both very happy with what they have earned and how the system works.
Please, please good Victron folks, if you are not already, please talk to the Axle Energy team with regards adding Victron based systems to their growing comparability list. And it would also be nice to have simple integration with the regular Smart tariffs too.
I know some very clever people on here will likely say that “well you can do it like this with Node Red” or “you can do it like that using Home assistant”, but there is a huge chunk of the general public (me included), who are not of the “software tinkerer mindset community”. The Fox, Tesla, Givenergy etc existing integrations don’t rely on extra software to enable integration to work.