The future of energy is distributed. Instead of buying energy from a small number of giant power plants, traders on the energy market are increasingly dealing with a large number of small, widely distributed assets. Energy assets include not only power-generating plants such as wind and solar installations, but storage facilities such as stationary batteries (and, in the future, EVs equipped with V2G technology).

This complex web of assets needs sophisticated software to manage it, and Tesla, ever thinking ahead, has developed a software product called Autobidder that some say will enable Tesla Energy to become a giant distributed global utility as it deploys more and more solar and energy storage systems, at both residential and utility scale.

“Autobidder provides independent power producers, utilities, and capital partners the ability to autonomously monetize battery assets,” reads Tesla’s description of the product. “Autobidder is a real-time trading and control platform that provides value-based asset management and portfolio optimization, enabling owners and operators to configure operational strategies that maximize revenue according to their business objectives and risk preferences.”

“Autobidder is successfully operating at Hornsdale Power Reserve (HPR) in South Australia, and through market bidding, has added competition to drive down energy prices,” says Tesla.

The platform, which apparently also works with non-Tesla energy storage products, is in use at other sites around the world. “Autobidder has hundreds of megawatt-hours of assets under management that have supplied gigawatt-hours of grid services globally. Autobidder operates at every scale: from aggregations of behind-the-meter residential systems to 100 MW utility-scale installations.”

Electrek reports that Tesla is using Autobidder to manage its Powerwall deployment with Green Mountain Power in Vermont. The Telegraph tells us that Tesla has applied for a license to become an energy provider in the UK, where it has already installed several Powerpack projects.

Sources: Electrek, The Telegraph