I’ve noticed lately that the Day Ahead prices are being imported later and later. They used to be in the system shortly after 1 p.m. Recently, I’ve repeatedly noticed that the prices don’t appear in the system until after 3 p.m. Unfortunately, by then, overnight consumption through to the following day isn’t taken into account, and there are usually no cheap-price periods left after 3 p.m. to address this.
I had already argued in the past for extending the forecast period, but if the prices are now regularly being imported even later, the system is currently losing all of its economic value.
I’ve been noticing this too for a few weeks now. The day-ahead prices used to be in the system shortly after 1 pm, but these days they regularly don’t come through until around 3 pm. Unfortunately, that’s not much use for planning the night-time hours, because by then it’s no longer possible to plan ahead for the cheaper hours. Does this happen with every tariff for you, or only with a particular provider? That would help narrow down whether the issue is with the data source or the VRM import itself.
You are perfectly right. It is the same for the Czech Republic – it takes hours until the DESS gets information about the new prices. What I also see as a big disaster is that every day the trade mode starts with a wrong plan – with the assumption that at EOD, the SOC should be at minSOC at midnight. What I see now regularly is that the DESS often buys from the grid for evening grid sales, but after 15:00, when the plans are updated, the sales are cancelled because the energy is needed to cover the night… so the opportunity is lost day by day.
This has nothing to do with any electricity supplier. The VRM reads the day-ahead prices directly into the system. They come straight from the exchange; Victron receives the prices and feeds them into the system. Using these raw exchange prices and the purchasing formula, your system calculates your individual price, or the price charged by your electricity supplier.
Yes, it’s a bit cumbersome at the moment. Around this time last year, Victron was experimenting with price forecasts. In my view, that was the right approach. @Barbara wrote at the time that they thought they could forecast prices very accurately, but that Victron didn’t expect this feature to have any commercial benefit. I saw it differently last year, and I still do. The current example makes that clear.
In my view, the price forecast doesn’t even have to be particularly accurate. It simply needs to make the system take consumption over a longer period into account—in this example, the second half of the night. This is always most obvious when moving from a weekend with low prices to Monday, when prices are higher. On Sunday, you could certainly charge the battery to its maximum, because prices are generally much higher on Monday, when industry and commerce are back at work.