Hi! I have Tibber in Germany and just realized around 9:00 that there already is a price curve and DESS schedule for tomorrow. Usually, prices for the next day become available just after 13:00
Today Oct 4th
Tomorrow Oct 5th
=> is this a fancy new VRM price forecast feature or did they really start to provide prices for 48h or is it just a bug at VRM, Tibber, or EPEX?
I think Victron is slowly venturing into something like forecasting prices for the coming days. I think this is a really good idea, in principle. It could counteract the phenomenon of low prices on weekends (businesses and retailers are shut down) and noticeably higher prices during the week. Hopefully, they don’t fail and scrap it after the first few attempts.
Here’s some further clue to the price forecast theory - the actual prices for tomorrow are there and look different:
My approach here for the forecast would differentiate between weekdays, e.g. a simple 15min-grid-lookup table that averages the prices of the past 2..4 weeks separately for each weekday. This would automatically capture different price patterns for weekends.
I think that’s roughly what Victron is doing. How good and accurate this price is is secondary in my view. The greatest impact could be identifying potential shortfalls in PV production and taking them into account.
Well - let’s hope it’s really like that, i.e. based on weekday.
Meanwhile i just discovered that it’s also showing a price for the day after tomorrow:
So seems like the forecast is up to 48h into the future.
Unfortunately, I see dark clouds on the horizon. At the first incorrect forecast that leads to even the slightest inappropriate decision, a storm of dissatisfied users will break out again. Although the long-term positive effects outweigh the negative ones.
I’d like to take up your idea of the average price and perhaps elaborate on it a bit. I think I would weight it. Just a thought: 50% of the price from the previous week, 25% of the price from the week before, 12.5% the week before that. And then maybe a 12.5% weighting of the previous year’s price. That would possibly incorporate seasonal changes.
I’m sure that Victron dev team is smart enough to handle that and draw their own un-biased conclusions based on the plenora of real-world energy data they’re collecting….
Yeah, why not - there’s always room for perfection 
