Tesla Turned a Former French Coal Plant Into a Battery Farm. Autobidder Handles the Rest.

Tesla has released a new video showing off how its Autobidder platform helps battery operators squeeze the most value out of their Megapack installations.

Autobidder is Tesla’s energy trading and battery optimization service built for Megapack. The idea is simple: instead of managing energy trading themselves, battery operators hand the job over to Tesla and share in the revenue generated from wholesale electricity markets.

The video focuses on the Chevire battery energy storage site, located in Nantes in the west of France. The location has a bit of history to it, since it sits on the grounds of a former coal power plant that once supplied electricity to much of western France. The plant was decommissioned back in the ’90s as part of France’s shift toward renewable energy, and years later Tesla and Harmony Energy teamed up to turn the site into a battery storage system.

Harmony contracted Tesla on a full wrap EPC basis, which covers the design, engineering, procurement and construction of the site. Tesla stays involved well beyond the build too, handling the ongoing operation and maintenance along with optimizing the services the batteries provide. That optimization is where Autobidder comes in.

So what does Autobidder actually do? It runs on long-term forecasting, short-term forecasting and real-time inputs pulled from weather data, system information and customer feedback. All of that gets used to optimize the system, maximize revenue for customers and deliver the best possible services for the grid.

Customers can watch the real-time trading no matter where they are. That trading spans wholesale markets like day-ahead energy auctions, real-time spot markets, and arbitrage between the different energy markets. The platform is also active in ancillary contracts, which includes balancing services with the system operator, frequency services, and local flexibility markets from the distribution network operator.

Tesla teams handle the monitoring of the site, and Harmony can tap into that through platforms and monitoring screens based out of the London and French offices. Keeping the battery as healthy as possible is a big deal here, since it feeds directly into investment decisions. The more money the battery makes, the more batteries customers can build out, and the more available that battery becomes to support the grid.

The Chevire project was a first for both companies in France, marking Harmony’s debut in the country and Tesla’s first on the equipment side there. Because Tesla is vertically integrated across its Megapack and Autobidder teams, everything could be optimized together so the battery went live and started earning maximum revenue from day one.

For Tesla, the pitch is that Megapack helps decarbonize and secure the grid, and Autobidder makes it easy for just about anyone to operate these batteries.