Tracking my Powerwall when it's being used as a power plant by my grid provider

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1

My electric provider, Eversource, has a program in combination with Tesla to allow my home to act as a virtual power plant to sell my Powerwall energy back to the grid during peak summer usage events. Unfortunately there still isn’t great visibility in the Tesla app for when these events occur. But I realized I could track these events with a simple binary sensor template since I’ve got the Tesla Powerwall integration installed.

The following binary sensor will be on when my Powerwall battery is providing power to the grid and off when it isn’t.

template:
  - binary_sensor:
    - name: Grid Powerplant
      # if both the battery is discharging and we're selling power to the grid,
      # the Powerwall must be acting as a powerplant for the grid 
      # (with a little threshold so it doesn't trip accidentally when the Powerwall is in standby)
      state: >
        {{ float(states('sensor.powerwall_battery_now')) > 0.05
           and float(states('sensor.powerwall_site_now')) < 0.05 }}
      device_class: power
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2

I have the binary_sensor.grid_services_active, which tells me when my VPP is using my battery.

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3

I’m curious about this. Does that entity really indicate VPP active? Or is it a flag to indicate when power is flowing to the grid from the battery?

I have not configured my VPP yet, and I have a lot of activity on that sensor. It’s somewhat interesting that there hasn’t been any change for an hour as my solar starts to produce:

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I have not found any documentation on the “grid_services_active” API response – just a few various posts of people asking what it is.

I’m on self-powered mode, and at night while using the battery I have noticed a few times (on the iPhone Tesla app) a small amount of current flowing toward the grid, which I am curious about.

Anyone done any more digging on this?

4

For me with Amber SmartShift (which uses the Tesla VPP API)

I see Grid Services Active when they are charging my battery from the grid (10am) or dispatching from my battery to the grid (7pm) at 15 kW as I have three powerwalls (3 X 5 kW)

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What do your power entities show when your grid services are active?

5

Did you ever figure out what “grid_services_active” is indicating?

I’m currently w/o power and this sensor (binary_sensor.powerwall_grid_status) seems to indicate that. The grid power went off at 10:02:27.

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My binary_sensor.powerwall_grid_services_active sensor looks like yours with many changes. What’s curious is mine says “detected power” at the time the grid power actually went out and I went on the Powerwall for power. All those earlier entries where it says “cleared (no power detected)” are odd because there were no grid power disruptions at those times.

So, I don’t really get what binary_sensor.powerwall_grid_services_active is reporting.

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