Right now, SmartShift is quietly running the numbers on your battery. It's watching the wholesale market, checking the weather, and thinking about what your household is likely to do next, then turning all of that into a plan that gets the most value out of every kilowatt hour you store.
From the outside, all you see is a battery that charges when power is cheap and happens to be full when prices spike. There's a fair bit of thinking behind that, so let's walk through how it actually works.
Three forecasts, one plan
SmartShift builds its plan from three forecasts:
Your home's energy usage. SmartShift uses your historical electricity consumption to learn your household's rhythms. In your first weeks it starts with a simplified forecast that assumes today will look a lot like yesterday, and after about 30 days it has enough data to start predicting your daily and even weekly habits, like which days you tend to charge the EV.
Your solar generation. SmartShift pulls solar irradiance data for points around the country, uses your historical generation to estimate the size of your solar system, and combines the two to predict your panels' output over the next 24 hours.
Wholesale prices. Our price forecasting system was developed in collaboration with the CSIRO and uses thousands of data points describing the state of the electricity system to predict prices in future intervals.
SmartShift models how the devices at your home are connected and how power can flow between them, then combines the three forecasts into a plan for your battery. The goal is simple: minimise your energy costs over the next 24 hours. If prices are low now and forecast to be high later, it charges your battery so you can either use that cheap energy yourself or sell it back when prices peak. Timing those exports well is how battery owners on Amber can earn the same wholesale feed-in rates the big generators do, which can reach $19/kWh during price spikes.
A plan that never stops updating
Wholesale prices can move within minutes, clouds roll in, someone puts the oven on. So SmartShift doesn't build one plan in the morning and stick to it. It recalculates every five minutes as new information about your solar, your household load and market prices arrives, always making the best decision for right now based on what's coming in the intervals ahead.
You can watch it thinking on the plan screen in the app. Everything to the left of 'now' shows what actually happened: your household load, solar generation and prices. Everything to the right is a forecast, with a dashed green line showing SmartShift's current plan for your battery and grey shading marking the times it intends to send your battery a command. It's a live view of the strategy for the day ahead.
Smarter than a simple overnight charge
You might expect the battery to fill up every night while power is cheap. SmartShift is more precise than that, and it saves you money by being choosy.
Charging and discharging a battery involves small efficiency losses. To add 1 kWh of energy, a bit more than 1 kWh has to come in from solar or the grid, and to supply 1 kWh to your appliances, a bit more than 1 kWh has to come out of the battery. SmartShift factors those losses into every plan. If prices look relatively flat overnight and into the morning, skipping the overnight charge is genuinely the cheaper move.
If a small morning peak is coming, SmartShift charges just enough to glide through it without buying from the grid, then lets your solar fill the battery for free once the sun's up.
And when a big spike looks likely, SmartShift makes sure you're ready for it. Price spikes are where a lot of the value is, so having a charged battery waiting is a bit like an insurance policy: occasionally a forecast spike doesn't arrive, but being ready for the ones that do is what pays off. For one NSW customer with a 13 kWh battery and a 6 kW solar system, SmartShift unlocked around $1,000 of value over the year from June 2024 to June 2025.
Two brains working together
Your battery already has a capable brain of its own. Every battery ships with a Battery Energy Management System, or BEMS, built by the manufacturer. It lives on the device, reacts within seconds, and is generally designed to minimise your home's interaction with the grid.
SmartShift adds market intelligence on top. It sends control signals remotely that override the BEMS targets when there's money to be made or saved. Rather than micromanaging, SmartShift checks whether its planned power target is close to what your battery would do anyway in its default state. If it is, SmartShift lets the BEMS do what it does best, responding instantly to sudden changes in load or solar. When the market calls for something different, SmartShift steps in.
Because those signals travel remotely, they can take anywhere from ten seconds to a few minutes to reach your battery, and some manufacturers limit how often targets can be sent. So if you issue a manual command and see a short delay, everything is working as designed.
One quick setting check
Some batteries offer time-based charging, which charges the battery during fixed windows each day. Those windows are set by the BEMS and don't account for wholesale prices, so they can work against SmartShift's plan. If you're using SmartShift, switching time-based charging off lets it do its job properly and keeps your battery buying at the cheapest moments.
Set, forget, and let it hunt
SmartShift is always weighing your usage, your solar and the wholesale market, and refreshing your battery's plan as conditions change. You don't need to watch prices or time your exports; that's the whole point. But if you're ever curious, the plan screen shows exactly what it's up to and what it has in mind for the hours ahead. Your battery is working hard, and SmartShift makes sure that work is worth as much as possible.
Head to help.amber.com.au to check out more SmartShift FAQs.
