Digital platform Wattwatchers is helping Australian households and businesses become energy efficient during a time of rapid transition and technological evolution, writes the company’s chief of innovation, Grace Young.
Australia’s energy management marketplace is in rapid transition, with technological trends and data-driven solutions propelling energy management integration into new and emerging fields such as property technology (proptech), financial technology (fintech) and mobility.
Another of these fields is energy data as a service, a business model where two or more organisations buy, sell or trade machine-readable data in exchange for something of value.
Wattwatchers is an Australian digital energy platform at the forefront of this transition that helps households and businesses be energy efficient and maximise renewable energy.
Why consumers need energy data
Often when people get a big energy bill, they feel powerless. Energy companies are not incentivised to change this, which is a big reason we see static energy bills issued in arrears, often every three months. With such a lag between using energy and receiving bills, it is little wonder people are left scratching their heads when it arrives.
Increasingly, people are seeking alternatives, such as solar and batteries, but using them effectively is critical. This is where richer energy data than is provided by a utility company is so important. It helps with how you use energy, but also assists with purchases that have an impact on energy in the household, such as heating, pool pumps and appliances.
With real-time data, you can make immediate decisions such as turning high-energy usage equipment on or off, or up and down, as well as being able to take long-term approaches such as energy efficiency and demand management.
How a Wattwatchers device works
Our devices are shaped like the small circuit-breakers that slot into typical household and business meter boxes or switchboards. Attached to the device are accessories called current transformers that measure the energy flowing through them.
In a typical home, one Wattwatchers device can monitor up to six circuits. This includes the main grid connection, tracking energy coming in that you purchase from your retailer, and energy going out if you have solar or batteries.
The device can also track how much total energy your solar system is generating, and monitor key energy-consuming appliances and equipment such as electric hot water systems, air-conditioning units, pool pumps, EV chargers and general power and lighting circuits.
The device reads the information and sends it back to our servers via the cellular internet network, or through wi-fi.
In commercial and industrial use cases, one Wattwatchers device can cover two three-phase circuits up to 600 amps. There’s also a 3000-amp version.
Additional insight from energy data
The data analytics can show patterns of usage, seasonal changes and time-of-use information, which is important for businesses that face peak demand caps and penalty payments for exceeding limits.
Real-time data can also reveal the performance and operational wellbeing of assets such as solar systems, and can even support fault detection and predictive analytics in industry use cases.
Energy data can also remotely monitor electricity in a home to provide a “protective watch” of a loved one. For example, getting an alert if nanna doesn’t boil the electric kettle in the morning.
In the Internet of Things (IoT) era for energy, real-time data is a basic prerequisite.
Managing and reporting on energy use and carbon impact
Whether you want your household to reduce carbon emissions, or you run a business required to report on it for regulatory reasons, knowing what’s happening with energy in your premises is critical.
It’s not just a matter of how much energy you’re using, but also how much of it is coming from different sources, including the coal-heavy grid, or your solar system.
It’s easy to take the data provided by Wattwatchers devices to generate reports, firstly by taking baseline measurements, and then by monitoring the effects of changes you’ve made.
Some carbon accounting platforms rely on averages to do their calculations, however Wattwatchers provides more granular data to make these calculations more accurate.
The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) and leading university researchers have been using data from Wattwatchers devices to better understand how solar inverters behave during periods of high-voltage variability. This research is vital in ensuring the stability of the nation’s electricity supply in the age of distributed energy resources (DER), a transition led by households with rooftop solar.
Energy data as a service
Australian and global concerns about consumer data rights – including privacy and security – are making it increasingly difficult to collect data, hold it, and make it available to third parties. However, with some welcome government support, Wattwatchers has invested in developing a model for data sharing – with pre-approval from customers, and built-in protections and rewards for them – which underpins our emerging business offering we describe as energy data as a service.
This means we do the hard work of collecting data and making it shareable with third parties. This is often anonymised, but even in this form it’s still immensely useful.
Grace Young from Wattwatchers will be presenting at All-Energy Australia at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre on 26-27 October, 2022.