Agility: Automated Optimisation of Electricity Tariffs on Solis Solar Systems

What is Agility?

Agility is a software application that can be run on pretty much any computer, including a Raspberry Pi.

Agility is designed for use with Solar and Battery systems, and aims to reduce your electricity bill by automatically selecting the cheapest times from your electricity tariff and using them to charge your solar batteries, using Agility's expectations of how much grid power you need to augment your solar generation.

Agility was originally designed to optimise usage of the Octopus Agile tariff, but it can now manage the use of any tariff from any supplier, except those such as the Octopus Intelligent tariffs where the supplier takes control of your system.

Agility is designed for use with Solar and Battery systems that use a Solis Hybrid Inverter. It has been tested using my own domestic Solis Inverter and PylonTech batteries, but should work with any other battery systems where the Solis Inverter is responsible for and controls charging and discharging of the batteries. Unfortunately if you use any other inverter for your solar system, Agility isn't for you.

Agility is written in JavaScript and runs using either Node.js or Bun.js. However, it makes use of a Docker Container that we provide, and this looks after the entire run-time environment for you. So provided you have Docker installed on your computer, that's all you should need to worry about!

Ideally though, we'd recommend running it on either:

a Linux-based computer such as a Raspberry Pi on your own home network
a Linux virtual machine running on a Windows or Mac computer on your home network
an external cloud-based Linux virtual server to which you have full access

Getting Started

First, read the Checklist document to ensure you have everything needed to use and run Agility.

If all is OK, follow the instructions for installing on a Raspberry Pi.

If you are trying to install Agility on another technology or platform, modify the instructions appropriately.

To set up Agility to work with a tariff other than Octopus Agile, refer to the instructions for setting up the Octopus Flux tariff.

Adapt the instructions to match the prices and times for any other tariff from any other supplier.

The Octopus Agile Tariff

Agility was originally designed to automatically optimise use of the Octopus Agile electricity tariff. This is a highly dynamic tariff from the UK energy provider, Octopus.
Unlike other tariffs, in the Agile Tariff the price of electricity varies every half-hour throughout the day, based on actual wholesale electricity prices. Typically there are very cheap half-hour slots during the night but also sometimes during other times of the day or evening. Occasionally, primarily if there's a lot of windy weather, some slots are priced negatively, and you're actually paid for any electricity you use during that slot!

The Agile Tariff isn't all upsides: during the peak UK electrictity usage period between 16:00 and 19:00 the slots become extremely expensive, but Agility will try to ensure you don't fall foul of them! Occasionally there will be days when even the lowest priced slots are quite high, but even these are rarely as high as the Ofgem cap price.

The pricing of each Agile half-hour slot will differ from day to day. The highly variable nature of the Agile tariff makes it very difficult to use effectively without automation,but with the aid of automation, such as provided by Agilty, it's possible to "game" the tariff to make significant savings.

Octopus releases the next day's Agile tariff pricing at around 16:00 each day. Agility will automatically fetch and use this new tariff table as soon as Octopus makes it available.

Agility is primarily designed to save you money during the late Autumn, Winter and early Spring months when your solar panels are typically generating less power than you consume each day and therefore you need to rely on the grid for some or most of your power. It does this by automatically and dynamically identifying how much grid power you need throughout the day and night, identifying the cheapest Octopus Agile tariff slots to use to provide that power, and instructing your Solis Inverter to force-charge your battery from the grid during those cheapest slot periods. As a result, the vast majority of your household power needs will be provided from what's stored in your batteries rather than being supplied directly from the grid.

However there are sometimes savings to be made even during summer months. Agility allows you to set a price below which a slot is always used to charge your battery (unless it's already full). Agility defaults this price at 10p/kWh. On summer days,if such very low-priced slots become available, Agility will use them to fill up the battery, which means that when the sun rises, your system will begin exporting sooner than usual. By using the Octopus export tariff that pays 15p/kWh, you'll effectively make at least 5p/kWh on any low-cost slot that was used.

Essentially Agility allows you to buy electricity at a low price and potentially sell any surplus back to the grid later at a higher price.

Unlike other systems for optimising use of the Octopus Agile tariff, Agility is completely automatic. Once started you should be able to leave it to optimise everything for you behind the scenes. Agility is designed to be resilient: it automatically and cleanly handles any API failures, which can occur particularly with SolisCloud, and re-issues the API calls if necessary until they are handled successfully.

Whilst it's still advisable to try to avoid doing anything during the 16:00 to 19:00 peak period that consumes large amounts of power, it's not essential. The idea of Agility is that you don't need to fit your behaviour and power use around the Agile tariff: Agility will learn and adapt to the profile of your typical daily power usage, and make its decisions about when and how much battery charging is required to meet that power usage pattern so that you almost always have sufficient power in your batteries to meet your needs, charged up at the cheapest possible times.

It's still interesting to check what Agility has done and the decisions it's made using your SolisCloud App and see the amount of power you've consumed each day and how much (or little!) it's cost on the Octopus App. It's actually rather addictive!

Using Agility with Other Tariffs

Agility isn't restricted to using the Octopus Agile Tariff. You can quickly and easily define within Agility a custom tariff which is then used as if it was the Agile tariff by Agility. When used in this way, you aren't restricted to Octopus tariffs: most tariffs from any supplier can be used, though of course it only makes sense to use Agility with tariffs that have a mixture of cheap and more expensive time periods each day.

Agility will manage when and how much electricity you purchase each day based on its calculations of:

the amount of energy you would be expected to use throughout each day
the amount of solar power you are expected to generate that day (assuming you have solar panels)
the current level of charge in your batteries.

Agility will aim to buy what you need at the cheapest times of your tariff, but may, sometimes, require topping up your batteries at more expensive times. Agility will never attempt to charge your batteries duing the 4pm-7pm peak times.

How Much Does Agility Cost?

Nothing! I've made it available free of charge as what's known as an Open Source product.

You're free to download it and use it as much and for as long as you wish.

How Much Money Will Agility Save Me?

That's impossible to predict. It will depend on a number of factors:

the size of your solar system: ie how much power your panels can generate
the amount of battery storage
the amount of electricity you typically consume each day
the weather:
- it affects the Octopus Agile tariff prices (they're typically cheapest when its windy or stormy)
- it also, of course, affects how much power your solar panels will generate
the time of year. In the UK, a solar system will generate approximately 10 times in high Summer what it generates in the depths of Winter!

I'd recommend that you have sufficient battery storage to cover at least a third to a half of your typical daily power needs. Basically the more battery storage you can afford the better. The good news is that battery storage continues to fall in price, and there's no VAT on domestic batteries.

The more power you typically use, the more Agile or tariff time slots you'll need to charge your batteries, so you'll begin to need to use more expensive slots. So if you're also charging an EV and running a heat pump, your potential savings may be less than if you consume at or below the UK average of 7kWh per day.

So I can't make any guarantees, but over the last year, by way of example, I've seen my average price for electrictity to be around 12p/kWh when using Octopus Agile - about half the Ofgem capped price.

To put that into context, I don't have an EV or Heat Pump, but we're an above-average power consumer. I have sufficient battery storage for between 75% and 100% of our daily needs and I have a fairly large (6kW peak) solar array.

Warranty and Liabilities

You'll see a copy of the Open Source license at the end of this Readme document. You'll notice that no warranty is provided under the terms of the license: you use Agility entirely at your own risk.

However, I use the exact same software myself 24 X 7 to manage my own Solar system, so I believe it should be safe and reliable for others to use, provided it is set up and used correctly.

Technical Support

No technical support is provided for Agility.

If you know about Github, then you can raise issues here but I'm under no obligation to fix or troubleshoot issues that you come across or report.

Users of Agility are encouraged to join and use the following Facebook Groups to discuss its use and for help with any issues:

Octopus Energy Automations Unofficial (Batteries / Solar / Home Assistant)

Solis Solar Inverter Owners Group

I'll be monitoring these Facebook Groups from time to time and will assist whenever practical.

Updates

Updates to the Agility software will be made available from time to time via this Github repository.

It's worth checking here occasionally for updates.

A quick and simple automated update mechanism is included in Agility's web-based user interface.

Prerequisites for Running Agility

As described above, you need a Solar and Battery system based around a Solis Inverter
Your Solis system needs to be registered to use the SolisCloud system and associate Apps. Your installer should have already done this for you.
You can use Agility with any tariff from any supplier (apart from Octopus Intelligent ones or any others where your supplier takes control of your system).

Agility was originally designed to operate against the Octopus Agile tariff, and when its prices are right, it's a great tariff to use.

If you decide to use an Octopus tariff, but you aren't currently an Octopus customer, you can use this referal link:

https://share.octopus.energy/lemon-crick-638

In doing so, you'll get a £50 initial discount off your first bill, and I'll also receive a £50 rebate which helps me to maintain and develop the Agility system!
You need to contact Solis technical support to do two key things:
- activate remote access to your Inverter
- get authorisation to use their official remote control APIs. As part of this step, you'll be able to obtain an API key and secret which are needed by Agility to control your inverter.
Here's what you need to do:
- Submit a service ticket and wait until you get their response.
- Next, go to https://www.soliscloud.com/#/apiManage.
- Activate API management and agree with the usage conditions.
- After activation, click on *View Key". A pop-up window window will appear asking for the verification code.
- First click on Verification code. You will get an image with 2 puzzle pieces, which you need to overlap each other using the slider below.
- You should receive an email with the required verification code
- Once confirmed, you will get your API key, secret and API URL
These steps are needed to allow Agility to send the signals across the Internet, via the SolisCloud system, that tell your when to charge your batteries. By default, Solis don't automatically allow access to its APIs, and, to be honest, they make it a bit of a pain to do so. Fortunately it's a one-off process, and once set up, it should all be plain sailing from then on.

Unlike other solutions for automating Solis systems, there's no physical changes you need to make to your inverter set-up: Agility does everything by using SolisCloud's official APIs.
Needless to say, the computer on which you run Agility needs access to the Internet in order to send those APIs to the SolisCloud server.
In order to improve the accuracy of the predictions made by Agility in terms of how much grid power you need at any time of the day, you can optionally make use of the excellent Solcast system. Solcast offer a free tier of service for domestic users, which provides enough information to allow Agility to make much more accurate predictions about how much or how little solar power your system will provide in the hours ahead. This helps to ensure that Agility doesn't unnecessarily purchase more grid power than you need on sunny days, but also ensures that Agility purchases any additional power to cover your needs on cloudy and gloomy days.

Using Solcast is optional but recommended: it's pretty straightforward to set up an account and specify the specific details of your system so that they can provide the daily predictions (which are more often than not uncannily accurate!).

If you opt not to use Solcast, then Agility will still make predictions, but it uses a moving average of your daily solar output that is derived from the SolisCloud data for your system. Using this information may occasionally result in Agility charging your batteries more than needed (if it's an unusually sunny day), or failing to charge your batteries sufficiently (if it's an unusually gloomy day), in which case they may run out prematurely and you may begin to directly use grid power, potentially during a high-priced slot.

License

Copyright (c) 2024-25 MGateway Ltd,
Redhill, Surrey UK.
All rights reserved.

https://www.mgateway.com
Email: rtweed@mgateway.com

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

  http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.

robtweed/agility

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