Some people trade stocks, but Tesla wants to trade energy capacity. The company is building a new team of traders to do just that with its Autobidder platform.
Autobidder is a real-time trading and control platform for energy assets, like Tesla’s Powerpacks, Powerwalls, and Megapacks, optimized through machine learning to better use and more directly monetize the assets.
It was first launched last year, and earlier this year we learned that it already has over 1.2 GWh of energy storage under management.
As Tesla deploys more energy assets, the product is becoming increasingly important for the company.
Important enough that Tesla is now building a team of traders who are going to be monetizing those assets through that platform.
Yesterday, Julian Lamy, Tesla’s head of Energy Trading and Market Operations, announced on LinkedIn:
“I’m excited to announce that I’m building a new team at Tesla focused on Energy Trading and Market Operations. This team will drive performance of Tesla’s global fleet of battery + renewable projects, build expertise in wholesale energy markets, and support development of Autobidder, Tesla’s automated energy trading platform.”
He linked to a job listing for “Senior Energy Trading Analyst, Energy Markets.”
In the job description, it sounds like a stock trader for energy assets:
“We are looking for a Senior Energy Trading Analyst to drive continual performance improvements of the largest fleet of battery storage projects in the world. This includes Tesla’s utility-scale battery fleet (i.e., transmission level) and virtual power plants (i.e., aggregation of residential batteries at the distribution level). Using Tesla’s in-house automated trading platform, Autobidder, you will be responsible for bidding batteries into multiple wholesale energy markets, ensuring the assets meet contractual obligations, and complying with market rules. This includes: developing and executing trading strategies, monitoring automated trading systems, balancing risk and expected returns from different trading strategies, making real-time trade decisions during key market opportunities, analyzing asset performance and market conditions, developing tools to support analytics, developing and prototyping new algorithm ideas and strategies as part of the team’s R&D process, communicating complex situations to broad audiences, and presenting to internal and external stakeholders.”
Tesla is apparently looking to build a whole team of those traders in order to manage their increasing energy assets, which are growing fast through large new battery projects using Megapack, but also new virtual power plants more recently.
Last month, Tesla announced its first completely in-house virtual power plants using Powerwalls in California.
Ultimately, the company wants to become a global decentralized electric utility through that business model.
Electrek‘s take
This is an interesting new job at Tesla. You basically use Autobidder to manage decentralized energy assets and monetize them to the highest bidders… electric utilities.
Interestingly, I also found links between Tesla and Watt-Learn, a startup that appeared to be building an Autobidder-like software before Tesla.
Lamy, who now heads the effort at Tesla, was founder and CEO of Watt-Lean before it was acquired by an unnamed company in November 2018.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that company is Tesla, but I can’t confirm it as of now. It looks like after the acquisition from a unknown company, the startup continued to operate independently until recently.
If you have more information about the situation or any other interesting Tesla info, feel free to reach out via email at fred@electrek.co, via Wickr (encrypted): Fredev, or through my social media: Twitter and Instagram.
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