Tesla enters Europe energy market with its Autobidder platform

Tesla is entering the European energy market with its Autobidder platform to monetize energy storage products.

Earlier this year, we reported on Tesla’s Autobidder product, a step toward becoming an electric utility.

The company described the product:

“Autobidder provides independent power producers, utilities, and capital partners the ability to autonomously monetize battery assets. Autobidder is a real-time trading and control platform that provides value-based asset management and portfolio optimization, enabling owners and operators to configure operational strategies that maximize revenue according to their business objectives and risk preferences.”

In short, the platform is used to better and more directly monetize energy storage assets, like Tesla’s Powerpacks, Powerwalls, and new Megapacks.

Tesla is currently using Autobidder in Australia and in the US.

Today, the European Power Exchange (EPEX SPOT), which is an electric power exchange operating in several major European markets, announced that Tesla joined their exchange:

“Congratulations to Tesla for starting your first day of trading with us! We are happy to have you on board.”

It sounds like Tesla will link its Autobidder platform to the EPEX SPOT exchange.

Tesla Energy executive Rohan Ma commented on EPEX SPOT’s announcement:

“We are excited to launch our Autobidder platform in Europe this summer for Tesla customers seeking to monetize their energy storage assets in electricity markets.”

Last year, Elon Musk said Tesla Energy, the energy division of the automaker, is becoming a distributed global utility, and it could even outgrow its automotive business.

The idea is that Tesla would keep deploying more solar and energy storage systems — big and small — at the residential level and on utility-scale and manage those distributed systems to act as a giant global electric utility.

Electrek’s Take

I think this is a clear move toward expanding Tesla Energy, and I think we are seeing a renewed interest on that front.

Tesla has delivered energy storage products in Europe and globally for years, and it looks like the company is now looking to create more value out of them going forward.

It comes at a time when Elon is also hinting at an expansion of Tesla’s solar products outside the US, where it has been limited for now.

This is going to be big business for Tesla in the future. As distributed assets grow, there are going to be a lot of opportunities to optimize them to materialize the full value.