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9 min Reading time SMA has recently launched a new energy management system, called 'Energy Maximizer'. Those who activate this system can benefit from price swings on the electricity market. When prices are low, the battery is automatically charged at the best time, and when electricity prices are high, the battery feeds back stored energy into the grid. This should make a system with home batteries pay for itself even faster.
The downside of this feature is that there is a subscription attached: those who want to use the Energy Maximizer must first sign up for an 'SMA Premium' account, at a rate of €6.95 per month. The first 3 months are free, but after that period you start to pay. Which of course raises the question: is it worth it? In other words: will you save more than about 7 euros per month if you activate the Energy Maximizer?
We've looked at this question in the past few weeks at a number of customer sites and would like to share the results of our analysis with you. Here we go!
What we see in this sunny period of the year is mainly that the feed-back to the grid is delayed thanks to the Energy Maximizer. An average battery system would immediately start charging the surplus solar power into the battery as soon as surpluses arise. Once the battery is full (which happens quite early in the day in summer), then what is still left over gets fed back to the grid. You do receive money for this, but at the tariff applicable at that time. Since all solar panel-owning households in the Netherlands are feeding back at the same time, those tariffs are low at that time.
Figure 1: A regular battery system charges the battery immediately as soon as there are surpluses (orange) and discharges back to the home after sunset (red). The yellow part of the generation is fed back to the grid when the electricity price is low
A system with Energy Maximizer takes a different approach. First, charging the battery is postponed for a while: in the first hours of the morning the electricity price is higher than later in the day, making it worthwhile to first feed back from the panels to the grid instead of into the batteries. Only when the electricity price really starts to drop through the floor does the battery start to charge. This prevents feed-back at very low tariffs.
Second, the stored power is kept in the battery until the sun begins to set. We see that from about eight o'clock in the evening the electricity price starts to become much higher than during the day. As soon as the electricity price is high enough, the Energy Maximizer gives the signal to the battery to discharge. For power that you send back to the grid at that time, you receive a much higher compensation per kWh than during the day. This way the system should easily pay for itself.
Figure 2: The Energy Maximizer only charges the battery when the electricity price is low (orange), and discharges later in the evening when the electricity price is at its highest point (red), also feeding back to the grid.
A logical idea, that delayed feed-back, but does it really work? We followed it with a system with relatively many solar panels and a large battery pack (of 16.4 kWh). Without the Energy Maximizer, the battery would usually have been full around 2 PM. All surplus power would then have been fed back to the grid, at an average rate of 14 cents per kWh.
However, thanks to the Energy Maximizer, the battery only started charging from around 2 PM, just when prices were lowest and feed-back therefore yielded little. When the batteries were full, a few hours later, the electricity price had risen somewhat again. Feed-back at that time therefore already brought in more money.
But the real profit came later in the evening. From about 8 PM the electricity price rose above 30 cents per kWh. At that time the battery was discharged, partly to supply the home, but mostly for feed-back to the grid. That feed-back in the evening quickly brought in more than 4 euros.
This first analysis of the figures seems to indicate that setting up the Energy Maximizer will definitely be worthwhile, at least in summer. How much it will yield exactly depends on many different things; how many solar panels there are, how much battery capacity there is, what the prices will do over the course of the day, etc. Therefore it cannot be said with certainty that the Energy Maximizer will be worthwhile for everyone, although we estimate that this will probably be the case for the vast majority.
However, it is important that the system is set up in such a way that it can feed back to the grid from the battery. This is especially important in summer, for example if you are on vacation and there is little consumption at home. If the battery cannot send its energy back to the grid, it will remain (almost) full continuously, and therefore will hardly make any profit for days on end. But please note: feed-back from the battery to the grid is not set to 'active' by default! You need to cghange this a setting to allow it to happen. Read this article for more information or immediately follow this step-by-step plan.
Even without the Energy Maximizer you can make smart use of the dynamic tariffs, but then it will cost you a bit more work. Instead of leaving the control to the automatic system, you can namely choose yourself at which times you want to charge or discharge the batteries. You can configure this with the so-called Energy Planner. To be clear: you do not need an SMA premium account for this - so it's free. You will find some explanation here about how that works.
On the SMA Energy app you can see the course and forecast of generation and consumption, with below it a graph of the electricity price for the day. This is all visible on the 'dashboard' page. On the 'history' page you see the course of the battery charge. What may give a bit more insight at a glance is to look at Sunny Portal. If you click on 'Monitoring' and then on 'Consumer balance' you can see both the battery charging and discharging as well as the electricity price on 1 page. (Tip: if the electricity price does not appear immediately, click on 'Display options' and check the box for the Electricity price). Remember that the Energy Maximizer tries to take into account future generation and consumption; therefore it is sometimes a bit of a puzzle to understand why the system makes certain choices, but in the end it can always be logically explained.
Figure 3: On the 'Consumer balance' page on Sunny Portal you see both the generation and battery charging and discharging, as well as the electricity price per quarter hour
We think that for most people the new system from SMA is worth taking out a Premium subscription. That's why we usually start the free trial period of 3 months immediately with new installations. Please note, this currently applies only to installations with a Sunny Boy Smart Energy single-phase hybrid inverter or an SMA eCharger. For all other systems (such as with the Sunny TriPower Smart Energy) the Energy Maximizer does not yet exist: that will only come sometime next year, according to SMA.
For those systems where it is possible, the following applies: You will automatically be notified when the trial period ends, and money will never just disappear from your account to SMA. Only when you have entered your credit card details can there be a subscription. You can also stop the subscription at any time, so you are never tied to anything.
Make sure your tariffs are set correctly if you use the Energy Maximizer in combination with a dynamic energy contract. Both the consumption tariff and the feed-in compensation must be set to 'dynamic'. For the consumption tariff, a surcharge must be added (depending on your energy supplier: often it is about € 0.12 per kWh). For the feed-in compensation, a discount can be entered. This is not yet applicable today, with the netting scheme, so it can be left at 0. You can adjust the tariffs in the SMA Energy App, under 'My Display Area' and then 'Tariffs', or on Sunny Portal under 'Configuration' —> 'Tariffs'.
We think that from January 1, 2027, with the disappearance of the net metering scheme, it will be even more obvious to take a dynamic contract in combination with the Energy Maximizer. With automated smart control from SMA you help both to relieve the pressure on the grid and to make your batteries yield even more. You can choose the most economical, no-frills energy contract from any provider of electricity. After all, the smartness does not come from them, but from your SMA system. This way you are never tied to one particular electricity supplier.
Zonnefabriek is happy to help you set up and configure the system. Questions? Ask our Service department; we're happy to help you!
