@dansus, I’ll have a proper look through the app tomorrow. We don’t have smart tariffs at home, so I’ve never really played around with those settings. My understanding, though, is that you manually set the charging times and electricity rates in the app, rather than the tariff provider dynamically pushing its rates and timings directly to the battery.

Posted by: @dansus

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Agile et al, are linked to dynamic wholesale prices, so the system has to adapt to ever changing prices and charging times. Hence the need to make use of the providers API.

The SMETS2 spec, approved by Parliament in Nov'14, stipulates the Smart Meter mechanism to hold the tariff data.

That was defined and approved by MPs in order for the bill-payer to be certain of the price they were paying. It could be displayed on the IHD and read manually, and also picked up by household appliances (directly or via a decoder) for use in automated control. Putting the tariff data in the meter on a rolling basis means that it is also correctly applied when your tariff is using the Randomised Offset to the tariff-table. Not all tariffs do so, which causes surges on the grid.

It is a lapse by Ofgem which means that this SMETS2 mechanism isn't enforced. Energy Suppliers often don't download the current tariff data into the Smart Meter.

Parliament foresaw obvious problems with using the internet for each Supplier to allow devices to pick up tariff data via an API.

Unfortunately, that's the situation we're ending up with.

The outage of Google Cloud data in Europe yesterday (20oct26) should serve as a wake-up call, alerting us of the lack of resilience of an internet-based approach.

Posted by: @editor

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[...]  rather than the tariff provider dynamically pushing its rates and timings directly to the battery.

Allowing a 3rd party to directly apply data to an energy device in my home raises all sorts of alarms in my head!

Even having a 3rd party reading data from a domestic energy device is seriously problematic.
We found that out when GivEnergy collapsed earlier this year! 

@dansus, yeah, that's exactly what I wanted to check whether there's a dynamic option, and there is, but it appears to be blanked out. So you can select Octopus under dynamic tariff (not ToU), but solution is blanked out. @indevolt-tech @indevolt-uk can you please advise.

It was a power outage. If the magic pile of tricks feeding data out has a power cut then how the data is provided seems a bit irrelevant.

Anyway the real risk is mostly quite different - it's someone hacks the provider of the data, pushes out negative prices when it's actually 50p/kWh and watches from the side (or a system failure does similar).

Google Cloud outage:

Posted by: @etchedpixels

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It was a power outage. If the magic pile of tricks feeding data out has a power cut then how the data is provided seems a bit irrelevant.

Let's not jump to the conclusion that this was a power outage on the 43MVA Transmission Grid feed from Waltham Cross GSP (Grid Supply Point) to Google's European data centre at Platinum Way EN8 8YD

Those servers have UPS supplies and triple power cabling to provide system resilience.

Then there's that orderly row of 23 massive diesel generators which are very visible in Google's own publicity materials:

There are other major infrastructure centres nearby, including Vodaphone. Yet none of them suffered a power outage yesterday.

Posted by: @etchedpixels

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It was a power outage. If the magic pile of tricks feeding data out has a power cut then how the data is provided seems a bit irrelevant.

yes, the irrelevance is also that nobody would run anything critical on a single datacentre in a public cloud since as long as I remember 

Posted by: @transparent

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The outage of Google Cloud data in Europe yesterday (20oct26) should serve as a wake-up call, alerting us of the lack of resilience of an internet-based approach.

Also.. 

It saw cascading effects worldwide: taking out the Roblox game and Signal messaging app and causing smart mattresses worldwide to suddenly heat overnight and toast their occupants. 🤭 

@editor We will check and get back to you soon.

@editor Mystery solved to some extent. 

Need to select a region if that option is available on yours, but only Agile is supported so far. 

Nobody spotted that this extra step was available, so the UI/UX must need a tweak. 

@dansus yeah, that definitely needs fixing. Good spot. Well done.