As one of Australia’s leading electricity and gas suppliers, Jemena is always looking for innovative opportunities to add value for customers. With over $11 billion worth of major utility infrastructure, Jemena provides millions of households and businesses with essential energy services. That includes an extensive gas network, which services over 1.4 million customers across the country.

Having already invested in smart metering technology, Jemena saw an opportunity to transform the way it takes gas readings. It partnered with Telstra Purple – Telstra's technology services arm - and utilities technology services experts Nucleus3 to implement a future proof IoT-powered metering strategy across its entire gas network, powered by the Cumulocity connected device platform.

Jemena has a robust network of gas metering technologies across three business units; residential housing, commercial and industrial gas, and high-rise buildings. While the organisation had some existing smart meters, many of these were powered by older 3G network paradigms and were no longer fit for purpose.

Jemena wanted to address these issues with one cohesive smart capability, without having to make a significant upfront investment in digital meter technology. While customer service was a priority, Jemena also wanted to streamline its processes and use data more effectively to set an innovative platform for the future.

As a long-time trusted partner, Jemena engaged Telstra Purple to investigate how it could better connect its metering resources with more modern network infrastructure. After identifying Jemena’s core pain points, Telstra Purple – in collaboration with Nucleus3 – developed a cost-effective end-to-end IoT strategy designed to bring all of Jemena’s assets together under one platform.

Jemena’s high-rise use case was a challenge, as these buildings often had multiple legacy metering systems in one room. Telstra Purple worked with local IoT device manufacturer Eden Worth to develop a range of bespoke IoT sensors that plug into multiple legacy meters. These devices effectively take the reading data from these legacy meters and – using Telstra’s Narrowband IoT network – transmit it back a centralised Cumulocity IoT platform.

The Cumulocity platform captures all data from the new Eden Worth devices as well as Jemena’s existing smart gas meters. That provides the organisation with an intelligent ‘single source of truth’, with dashboards, tools and data feeds that enable device management, data visualisation, application development and analytics capabilities.

Cumulocity also allows Jemena to get real-time information about the health of their gas network, with sensors that can pick up things like temperature, whether doors are open, and even pipe corrosion levels. This critical information sets a platform for future innovation, allowing Jemena to build additional data-driven capabilities and move closer to developing digital twin technology.

As the organisation pushes closer to full deployment and more data becomes available, it will have access to even more network insights. That’s set to help Jemena unlock a raft of incredible opportunities for the future, providing an innovative point of differentiation.

Telstra is a sponsor of the 2023 IoT Impact conference, which will take place at the Sydney International Convention Centre on May 23. See the agenda and purchase tickets to IoT Impact 2023.