Australia: Amber use advanced price forecasts for tariffs

[jeffborg]

Amber has an advanced price in the api for predicted prices, this pr adds a boolean configuration option useAdvancedPrice

it's disabled by default but if enabled will allow the charge planner to pick better slots to charge.

[andig]

Does this provide longer-term forecast? Wouldn‘t you always use that if no real price is available?

[jeffborg]

No it does not provide longer term forecasts.

Amber have recently in the last 2-3 months made this advanced price forecast available via the rest api, but because it's not the official market operators forecast it was added in a new field.

I will be personally will be using this option because the market estimated prices are usually either way under or over. This amber advanced estimate field should be closer to the final price for each 1/2 hour block.

Final price is not known until 25 minutes into each 1/2 hour block that's how the amber operates using averaging of 5 min prices.

It should help the charge planner plan the right times to charge for the cheapest price.

I should add the amber app does not show these advanced prices for users without batteries connected to amber. So it may be confusing to users why the prices shown in evcc don't match their amber app if we make this the default.

[jeffborg]

A bit more info about this attribute is in this GitHub issue amberelectric/public-api#203

I'm also thinking a few more optimisations to the Amber tariff

1. Combine feedin and grid to 1 api call per minute so long as using same api key and site (all info is in the 1 call)
2. Automatically get site id if not given
3. An option to cap the feed in price to 0 (it can be negative but in my case I can limit my inverter so technically it's just zero cost and not saving any money)
4. Workout channel automatically knowing if grid or feed in.

[andig]

I would suggest to use the best data available, preferably without requiring a config option.

[jeffborg]

@andig removed the config option, I'm sure this advanced forecast attribute price data should help the charge planner.

[jeffborg]

Been running this locally for a couple of weeks now and will continue to do so.

• prices seem to start higher at the start of each 1/2 block and will usually trend downwards which is the opposite of the default aemo prices which start being lower and trend upwards - this does help the smart cost charging (until amber implements 5 minute billing)
• helps the charge planner out as the period of the lowest price is far more accurate than the aemo forecasts

[jeffborg]

My comment here still holds true #15892 (comment) seems to be no comment/actions for what is a simple pr

[andig]

Sorry, had missed the removed config and thought this being worked on.