The Hottest New Trade Is Your Own Electricity

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**Aaron Wilkes** (0:07)
Hey, how are you?

**Akshat Rathi** (0:08)
Good, how are you? Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too.

**Sarah Holder** (0:11)
Aaron Wilkes is a train driver who lives in a tiny village about an hour and a half outside of London, in a home built in the 1960s.

**Aaron Wilkes** (0:20)
A 1960s home with an air traffic control style energy system.

**Sarah Holder** (0:25)
An air traffic control style energy system. What Aaron's describing is the way he monitors and trades a hot commodity from his house, his own electricity.
Aaron is part of a growing number of vibe coding energy traders. People who produce energy at home using solar panels, store that energy using batteries, and then figure out when to use it and when to sell it back to the grid. Aaron does it all using that air traffic control system. A piece of software on his tablet, that shows a series of circles, kind of like those activity rings on an Apple Watch.

**Aaron Wilkes** (1:04)
The idea of this was to show my partner what's going on right now and then what's going to happen in the future. So each ring represents something different.

**Sarah Holder** (1:13)
One ring represents the power coming from the solar panels on the roof of his house.

**Aaron Wilkes** (1:17)
If the battery is charging, it will spin a certain way. If the battery is discharging, it will then go the other way.

**Sarah Holder** (1:22)
Another ring shows whether his house is importing energy from the power grid or exporting the energy he's generating at home to the grid.
It's all color-coded. Red tells him that the price of energy is high, purple a little less so. Green means it's cheap, like right now.

**Aaron Wilkes** (1:45)
So it's an indication to anyone in the house that, let's get the laundry on, charge the car, start heating hot water up, and if you want to, stick the aircon on.

**Sarah Holder** (1:54)
Aaron's built a sophisticated system that uses all this information to decide the best times of day to use or conserve his energy. And he says, the strategy isn't just about saving money. It's also about supporting the power grid by providing extra energy in times of higher demand.
And that can actually make him money.

**Aaron Wilkes** (2:15)
If I had a bigger battery, I'd be able to export a lot more, and there'd be a huge amount more opportunity there.

**Sarah Holder** (2:23)
Home energy traders like Aaron operate with the same ethos that commodities traders follow.
Buy low, sell high. But Bloomberg Senior Climate Reporter and host of the Zero podcast, Akshat Rathi, says, this doesn't look anything like a trading floor.

**Akshat Rathi** (2:39)
You're not going to get those Hollywood scenes of, I want the shares at this price. In the case of electricity trading, you're getting electricity prices for the next 24 hours, hour by hour, or half an hour by half an hour. And most of these people who take the agency of deciding to buy low and sell high, are automating those decisions.

**Sarah Holder** (3:00)
Aaron only makes about 5 to 10 pounds a month right now, but he's hoping that amount will rise.
And Akshat has spoken with traders who've made a few hundred dollars overnight, using similar tactics. So how exactly are they pulling it off? And could Aaron one day go from cutting down his bills to actually making real money?

**Aaron Wilkes** (3:19)
That's the dream, isn't it?

**Sarah Holder** (3:25)
I'm Sarah Holder and this is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, is the next hot trade electricity from your own home? We go inside a new class of energy trader that's taking more control over their bills and making money along the way. And how those traders are navigating everything from volatile electricity prices to threats posed by climate change.
So Akshat, you've been reporting on this phenomenon where regular old energy consumers are essentially becoming hobbyist energy day traders. They're using new tools to track the price of energy and using that information to time their consumption. And in some cases, sell energy they're generating at home. Tell me more about how this works.

**Akshat Rathi** (4:12)
More and more people are getting solar panels and batteries at home. Sometimes they are generating power that is more than what the consumer is consuming at home. Or sometimes they're generating power at a time when it's already a grid choke up, that there's too much solar power. And so it's better for that consumer to rather than send that solar power on the grid, actually store it in the battery that they have at home.