Data plays a critical role in Australia’s electrification and clean energy transition. This report highlights Wattwatchers’ deployment of over 5,000 smart energy monitoring devices around Australia to residential, small business, strata and educational facilities. Key findings show that end users (customers) are willing to share secure and anonymised data for zero-cost or for discounted services, while research institutes and businesses are willing to pay for this data though the value for data is not widely understood or accounted for yet. MEM participants benefited from deeper and more informed engagement relating to their electrification and energy transition activities.
Report extract
The My Energy Marketplace (MEM) is an innovative ‘New Energy’ initiative led by Wattwatchers Digital Energy (Wattwatchers). It focuses on striking a working balance between consumer energy data access, choice of services and privacy protections on one
hand; and secure and ethical data shareability and portability for the benefit of consumers themselves, the electricity system, and the clean energy transition on the other.
The MEM was a $9.6 million Australia-wide project, running over three years and eight months (October 2019–June 2023), a period of time which featured severe disruption to participant recruitment and site installation due to the Covid pandemic. It was supported by a $2.7 million grant from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA).
Now, the MEM is continuing beyond its ARENA project end date of 30 June 2023 as an emerging Wattwatchers business stream, providing energy data as a service. The service consists of a continually expanding, ethically shareable dataset from over 5,000 Australian sites under Wattwatchers near-real-time monitoring. The sites are mainly homes with rooftop solar, but the cohort of sites also includes small businesses, strata complexes, community facilities and schools, and is set to expand post-ARENA to add commercial and industrial (C&I) sites.
