Our Solutions

Across the world, energy systems are changing at a rapid pace.

We believe that advanced metering and a whole new world of technology and communications solutions can play a critical role in helping to meet and support this change.

We believe that our advanced metering and communications technology can help households and businesses participate in and share the benefits of this exciting new energy future.

From intelligent insights in batteries and EVs, to working with our partners to create world-leading virtual power plants, our technology teams are working to drive positive change for the energy sector and offer our customers a new collection of future services – today.

We’ll be bringing the best of this technology to showcase right here in Tasmania. This includes the next generation in metering and data delivery, and advanced digital tools for customers to schedule, track and give feedback on our service.

Dynamic Hot Water Control

Hot water heating is traditionally controlled by the network provider’s fixed time schedule which used to coincide with the time of low wholesale prices driven by coal fired power.

High penetration of roof top solar and other factors are now often driving lower wholesale prices in the middle of the day. This shift in pricing is getting more extreme.

Our challenge was to find a solution to dynamically control hot water heating to benefit our retail customers, network businesses and household and business customers.

The TasMetering hot water service enables real-time dynamic control of all hot water heaters across the fleet of systems. Multiple control modes are provided:

On-demand immediate ON/OFF (via Intelli-API)
Dynamic schedule updates (via Intelli-API)
TasMetering control based on wholesale price; and
Full-service VPP enablement

Fail-safes are built in to ensure the customer does not run out of hot water. This service is successfully operating now in hundreds of homes in NSW and South Australia, providing valuable insight for grid operators.

Solar management

Solar systems are typically not independently measured. Both customers and their retailers have poor visibility of solar system performance and poor user experience dealing with solar inverter technology. We explored how we could help customers cheaply and reliably get visibility on household solar generation. We also wanted to help retailers and customers to make the most of new dynamic export limits being introduced in some states across Australia.

Our TasMetering solar service offers near real-time solar generation and household consumption data whilst our Solar Plus offering fully enables dynamic export limiting.

Batteries

Combining a battery system with a solar system is becoming ever more attractive. In basic form, batteries provide simple energy shifting from day to night, however this leaves value on the table for the retailer.

We are working on new solutions to economically optimise fleets of batteries to reduce costs for retailers and increase benefits for households.

We believe the solution lies in managed behind-the-meter connectivity to battery and solar inverters via a communications bridge. We hope to soon provide a service that enables both local optimisation, and remote fleet orchestration of DER systems.

Electric Vehicle Charging Management

Electric vehicle charging presents a growing opportunity for consumers and retailers alike. For consumers, there will be a growing requirement to receive visibility and insights on vehicle energy usage. For retailers, there are big cost savings available through optimisation of EV charging times. For both stakeholders, there are a whole host of opportunities for innovative products and pricing.

The TasMetering electric vehicles service will provide managed monitoring and control of EV charging, with direct connectivity and remote control to fully leverage EVs as a dispatchable energy resource.

Virtual Power Plants

Households often contain large discretionary loads, such as pool pumps, air conditioners, and slab heating. Consumers often don’t mind exactly when these operate, just as long as they have a clean pool and a home heated or cooled to the right temperature.

Even shifting these loads by a small amount can have large impacts on the cost of energy to run them, but getting control of these loads has been costly and impractical.

We have been closely investigating how these loads can be controlled to minimise energy cost without impacting customer satisfaction.

A TasMetering VPP service will provide behind-the-meter monitoring and control of large discretionary loads, such as pool pumps, air conditioning, and slab heating. We believe that a final product can be pre-integrated with major VPP platforms, including Enbala, Autogrid, SGS, and more.

Home Insights (Load Disaggregation)

The future of home insights is moving away from total energy used and into usage by appliance. Our Intellihub load disaggregation service will help customers decide when to turn on their washing machine for cheaper energy and when to activate the pool pump or use air conditioning for less cost.

We’re developing state-of-the-art energy insight algorithms that can offer a personalised breakdown of energy by appliance, which can give the consumer a choice over how and when to use higher energy consumption appliances at home. Or go even further by adopting the control functions to turn appliances on and off remotely.

Metering Services API

TasMetering advanced meters provide levels of capability far exceeding the basic meter-to-cash delivered though the market. We have the potential to deliver data very rapidly and access 50+ metering parameters up to 10 times per second with multiple measurement and control elements and an LTE data connection.

We’re working on ways to unlock these data delivery and control services in a consistent, secure and site-centric way for third parties via a cloud-to-cloud link for off-market access to metering data and control of relays and settings.