3 November

Have mentioned Amber electric before. A huge opportunity for ordinary people, but also a risk if they don’t know what they’re doing. Amber allows you to access wholesale electricty pricing, directly. That can be an amazing opportunity, for example wholesale pricing now with renewables is negative for most of the day. It means with Amber you can literally get paid to use electricity, all day. Not just free, the grid *pays* you to use the electricity. However at peak times, wholesale prices can be very (even extremely) high. So without a battery (where you can use stored energy during peak times), or unless you can avoid using electricty at peak times, don’t go anywhere near Amber. Also if you have a very large solar system, you need to be very careful because exporting during the day with negative prices means *you* are paying to export energy into the grid, just like the big coal generators. There are ways to curtail those exports (a battery, or Amber can directly switch off some peoples’ exporting when prices are negative). Exciting times, but caution needed if you go into the wholesale market. An interesting option is to not buy solar, and just buy a battery, then get paid to fill it during the day with the negative prices (i.e. with other peoples’ solar), and then use that stored energy all night for yourself. Batteries are still relatively expensive though, so it can be hard to break even that way.