An update for Tesla battery owners

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We've been having issues controlling Tesla batteries lately. Here's our latest update on what’s happening and why, how this affects your SmartShift experience, and what we’re doing about it. You can keep this bookmarked for the latest updates on how we're progressing with solving this issue. 

What’s happening

Due to rapid uptake in Amber for Batteries, we are experiencing scaling issues that are affecting your ability to take control of your Tesla battery via the Amber app. 

As a result, you may have noticed that there are times when you request certain manual control actions via the app only to find that nothing happens. 

This is also starting to impact the ability of SmartShift to automatically command Tesla batteries to charge and discharge at optimal times.

Why is this happening

This control challenge is arising now due to the rate at which the overall fleet of SmartShift-controlled Teslas has grown. 

With this rapid growth customer base, the amount of requests/commands issued to our partner’s APIs within a given time frame has grown too. Meanwhile, the amount of calls that can be made to the APIs by SmartShift has remained constant (often to protect against cyberattacks or resource abuse). 

How this affects your SmartShift experience

At this stage, these scaling issues will primarily impact your ability to take manual control of your battery. 

With this in mind, while we understand that not being able to use all of the functionality within the app can be frustrating, we don’t expect that this control issue will materially impact your outcomes on SmartShift. The good news is that if you leave SmartShift to automate your battery it will make the right call in most cases, leaving you better off than you would have been without it. 

What we’re doing to address the problem

Working to reduce, and hopefully eliminate, the impact of these control issues on your SmartShift experience is our tech team’s number one priority at present. While a complete solution will take some time, the team will be iteratively rolling out updates to improve service in the short term. 

We have also taken the step to pause further onboarding of Tesla batteries onto SmartShift until we can resolve the problem.

What you can do to help 

Given that one of the factors that causes us to hit the rate limit is the amount of times that SmartShift users attempt to use manual controls in a given window, we recommend that you try to avoid using manual controls until we can resolve this issue. This will give all of our customers a fair chance at optimisation.

We’ll keep you updated

Thanks for being part of Amber for Batteries and for your understanding as our team prioritises finding a fix as soon as possible. We’ll keep you updated as we progress and let you know as soon as we expect things to be working normally. 



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