I just released version 3.0.0 of the openHAB spot Price Optimizer, which has evolved from this original discussion.
I’m starting this new thread for the sake of simplicity because the concepts have gone through such an evolution that it’s hard to go through the 360+ comments of the original thread.
Spot price electricity contracts and demand response
Spot priced electricity contract means that the price of electricity is different for every hour of the day. The day-ahead prices for most European countries are published at around 13.15 CET/CEST on the Entso-E Transparency Platform.
This solution helps to automatically schedule and optimize the consumption of electricity to the cheapest hours. The concept is referred as demand response in electrical grid. If your electricity contract is based on spot prices, you can save significant amount of money using this solution.
The solution can be applied for a variety of devices. The openHAB community members are using this to optimize the heating of their houses, heating domestic hot water in a water boiler, charging an electric vehicle when it’s cheap and heating the water of swimming pools.
The key concept is to calculate control points for the next day, which define when the device is expected to be ON or OFF (or have its other kind of state changed e.g. lower the target temperature when prices are high and increasing the target temperature when prices are low). The picture below illustrate two use cases: heating the domestic hot water and heating of a house.
The blue area represents the hourly spot prices of electricity. The red bars are the control points for heating the domestic hot water in a boiler during the three cheapest hours of the day. The yellow bars are the control points that control when the heating of a house is ON. On this example day, 14 hours of heating is distributed so that the morning and evening price peaks are avoided.
Complete instructions and detailed step-by-step tutorial
Complete installation and detailed step-by-step instructions are maintained in the project Github wiki, which can be found from the link below.
Roadmap for openhab-spot-price-optimizer version 4.0
- EntsoE binding will become an official add-on and it will save the day-ahead prices as a proper timeseries. When this Binding will be included in the upcoming openHAB releases, I will drop the entsoe.js which is included in the module at the moment and start using the EntsoE binding (any binding that will fetch electricity prices and store them as a timeseries will work).
- FMI Weather binding will get timeseries support and a configuration option to use the
fmi::forecast::edited::weather::scandinavia::point::multipointcoverage
dataset. When both of these are available in an openHAB release, I will drop the fmi.js which is included in the module at the moment and start using the FMI Weather Binding (any weather forecast binding which stores the data as a proper timeseries will work).
Release notes
I will use this thread for publishing the release notes of openHAB spot price optimizer. The release notes for the brand new 3.0.0 version can be found below.