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Beta — Solar-Aware Charge Planning is currently in Beta. It is enabled per vehicle during an early-access phase. Data requirements, default values, and behaviour may evolve before general availability; we will surface any breaking changes in What's New - Updates and Release Notes.

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Overview

Solar-Aware Charge Planning lets the Gridio charging engine reserve battery capacity for expected solar production instead of buying that energy from the grid the night before.

For locations that own a PV system, Gridio combines tomorrow's solar forecast with the vehicle's charging needs and the household's typical load. Overnight grid charging is reduced by the energy the vehicle is expected to be able to draw directly from the sun the next day, so:

• the customer's solar generation is consumed at home instead of being exported, and
• the share of charging that comes from paid grid energy goes down

Solar-Aware Charge Planning is layered on top of the standard charge-by deadline. The vehicle is still guaranteed to reach the configured target State of Charge by the configured deadline — the feature only changes when the grid charging happens within the available window.

How it works

The charging engine runs a planning cycle for each vehicle once every 30 seconds. When a vehicle is plugged in with a charge-by deadline that reaches into the next day, the engine:

1. Looks up the solar forecast for the vehicle's home location — an hour-by-hour estimate of PV power, summed across every inverter at the location, covering the period from now to the charge-by deadline.
2. Computes the usable share of that forecast. Not every kilowatt of forecasted PV power can end up in the vehicle's battery. For each hour, the engine subtracts the household's typical base load and discards production below the inverter's cut-in threshold; what remains is capped at the vehicle's maximum charge power. The result is the number of hours of effective solar charging the vehicle can expect.
3. Reduces planned grid charging by that amount. The price-based optimiser then schedules only the remaining grid hours into the cheapest slots of the available window.
4. Tracks the forecast against reality. As the day unfolds, the engine compares the PV actually produced so far against the forecast. If the day is delivering less solar than predicted, the engine adds hours back into the grid plan so the vehicle still reaches the target by the deadline. This protects customers against weather forecast errors.
5. Respects the customer's schedule. If the vehicle's charging schedule marks the current time as an "inactive" period, the engine does not start, modify, or maintain charging during that period — solar-aware or otherwise.

If the forecast is unavailable for any reason, the engine transparently falls back to the standard price-based plan; the vehicle still meets its deadline.

Requirements

The feature requires data on three things: the vehicle, the location, and the inverter(s). The fields below are what an integrator supplies through the standard Gridio device, customer, and location APIs.

Vehicle

Location