Save by setting your Community Trades on Powertracer
The team at Enosi highly recommends everyone on Powertracer sets up their Community Trades to save more money. It’s quite straightforward. It can increase your financial benefit, and also increase your proportion of clean energy consumption as well.
Community trading enables buyers and sellers of clean excess solar to trade energy without having to know each other. Trading is open to all members of the community and we highly recommend that everyone on Powertracer sets up these trade prices.
Here’s how you do it:
In the property overview page, click on “Trade Rules” in the top navigation bar:
This displays all trade rules for the property (below). In the “Community Trades” section of the page, click on the “Set community trade rules” button. If you have more than one electricity meter at your property select one meter at a time and set the pricing for each.
Now it’s time to set the Minimum sell price you are willing to sell for (if you have solar), and the Maximum buy price you are willing to pay for clean energy.
Not sure what prices to set?
You can’t lose anything if you set your Minimum sell price equal to your feed-in tariff, and likewise, if you set your Maximum buy price to the price of the wholesale energy component of your bill that you pay your retailer when you buy energy from them. In fact you’re more likely to get a good price and more clean energy trading if you do.
So what are your current energy rates when buying and selling energy?
It's easy to find in Powertracer, simply access your property and click on Settings. At the bottom of the Settings page you will see your Active Tariffs, like in the image below:
For this tariff, when buying energy, the portion of what you pay your retailer that is tradeable on Powertracer is 16.075c/kWh . This is the wholesale energy component of your bill. Remember that not all of what you pay your retailer by volume is tradeable, only the wholesale energy component is, not other components like poles and wires and environmental charges.
For the same tariff above, when selling excess solar to your retailer you would be receiving 5c/kWh at Off-Peak times, 3c/kWh at Shoulder times, and 10c/kWh at Peak times. This is known as a time of use (TOU) feed-in-tariff (or FiT). Because this FiT varies according to the time of day, it is best to set up your community sell prices on a “Time-of-Use” basis as well.
To do so, after opening the community trade rules, click on the Time-of-use pricing button:
Setting your prices
The quickest way to set your community trade prices is to click on the “Copy from retailer default” button. That ensures the time periods line up with the periods used by the retailer. Now you can adjust the minimum sell price (for selling energy) and maximum buy price (for buying energy) if you want:
🙌 Handy Hint!
If you have excess solar to sell, and set a minimum sell price higher than the retailer default prices, it means you can get more for any exported solar that you sell to the community.
What happens now?
Now that your community trade pricing is set, Powertracer will trade energy between community members every 30 minute interval of every day.
Things to remember
Check your current retailer prices before setting up your community trades
After you receive rate changes from your retailer, ensure that you check the prices you have set up for both peer-to-peer and community trades to ensure they suit your new rates!
You can’t lose anything by setting your community trade prices to match the retailer default trade rules, but by doing do means you are highly likely to increase your use of clean energy from your community, all at a good price!
Don’t forget to check how much energy you are buying and selling in the community by opening your property overview page. Happy trading!
Learn more
Want to know more about how the trading works?