Compare & Contrast III.2. OEM Paths Through the Optimisation Layers
Tesla and Fluence
To cycle or not to cycle? It is a deceptively simple choice. Each dispatch decision consumes physical life, and captures or forgoes economic value. How do you optimise?
Looking at the industry through the optimisation ‘stack’ reveals how different actors choose to structure responsibility, where they draw interface boundaries. This is not primarily a question of technology, but of architecture.
Let’s compare and contrast how two OEMs approach this.
OEMs are closest to the asset’s technology. They define the operating envelopes through firmware behaviour, warranties, the hard constraints within which all higher-level decisions must live.
Tesla and Fluence offer roughly the same stack from hardware, to control, optimisation and trading, but they assemble and work it in different ways.
Tesla: The fully managed option
Autobidder is available only along with Tesla Megapacks. Tesla offers to manage the physics, economics, and governance within a single optimisation loop. Tesla hardware supports third-party optimisation and trading stacks (see comments in the last post on Tesla) but presumably the “fully managed” setup is encouraged and incentivised.
We saw previously how far Tesla extends the optimisation loop outward by becoming the party qualified to trade assets directly in the markets it enters.
