Domestic and small business electricity consumption has long been a black hole for researchers. Meters reveal how much someone is using but not what for, or—prior to the introduction of smart meters—when.
According to the CSIRO: “High quality residential energy data is extremely rare and valuable, leading to challenges in research data analysis.”
Wattwatchers Digital Energy has aimed to changed that, with its MyEnergy Marketplace, which won the Energy Management category in the 2024 IoT Awards, which were presented at the IoT Impact conference in Sydney last week.
MyEnergy Marketplace uses technology developed and deployed by Wattwatchers that collects and makes available to researchers highly granular data on electricity consumption and generation (from solar panels) by more than 5,000 households, community organisations and small businesses customers.
Data is collected about individual high power consumption devices such as heaters, air-conditioners, pool pumps, electric vehicle chargers and other sources.
MyEnergy Marketplace is the commercial outcome of a research project undertaken by Wattwatchers in partnership with the NSW Government’s Essential Energy business, which operates the electricity distribution network over 95 percent of the NSW land area outside the major cities.
The $9.6 million project ran from October 2019 to June 2023, supported by a $2.7 million grant from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency.
The data generated by MyEnergy Marketplace is now being used by the CSIRO, the University of NSW, the Australian National University, the University of Technology Sydney’s UTS Institute for Sustainable Futures, application developers, grant projects and community energy campaigns.
Wattwatchers is using the data to calculate CO2 contributions from electricity consumption every 30-60 minutes instead of annual averaging, and for a grid-wide voltage map for electricity supply stability and power quality management.
MyEnergy Marketplace is providing energy data as a service based on data from a continually expanding range of users. Most of these are homes with rooftop solar. Others include small businesses, strata complexes, community facilities and schools.
The range of users is being expanded to include commercial and industrial premises though the new CSIRO-led NSW Digital Infrastructure for Energy Efficiency project, which will also see data from 2000 MyEnergy Marketplace sites incorporated into the CSIRO Data Clearing House.
Access to MyEnergy Marketplace data has been made available to third parties via an API, hosted by Amazon Web Services.
Wattwatchers stated that near-real–time availability of this anonymised circuit-level electricity consumption data via modern APIs is “cutting edge and unsurpassed by other datasets currently available, such as the well-known but ageing Smart Grid Smart City dataset.” This data was gathered from 2010-2014.
Making consumers confident the data they provided would remain anonymous was one of the biggest challenges the initial project had to overcome, Wattwatchers stated in the IoT Awards nomination it submitted.
“Key to the innovation in the project was the purpose-designed development of the ‘customer-facing infrastructure’ for engaging and recruiting consumer participants, and for ethically and securely enabling data sharing.”
It added: “We found that, in spite of widespread security and privacy concerns, substantial numbers of consumers will share their energy data for bona fide research and solution development for the energy transition and electrification.”
To overcome these concerns Wattwatchers set up a consumer energy data advisory panel made up of volunteer experts: data academics, researchers, industry policy leaders, consumer advocates etc. This led to the development of plain-English terms and conditions embedded in a MyEnergy app for participants, an information security policy and a data governance framework.
Wattwatchers’ technology also played a key role in the MyTown Microgrid project in the small Victorian town of Heyfield, initiated to determine whether a local energy solution would be feasible and desirable for the town.
The project—co-led by Wattwatchers, the Heyfield Community Resource Centre and the UTS Institute for Sustainable Futures—saw Wattwatchers’ monitoring devices installed in 79 sites including homes, businesses, farms and two primary schools.
