EnergyAustralia has poured nearly
$10 million into Brisbane-based energy management company Redback Technologies
as part of a newly announced partnership that will see the retailer offer
customers a web-based smart energy platform to better manage their consumption
of both grid and rooftop solar electricity. Now solar installation Brisbane, solar
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The $9.3 million deal, announced at
the All-Energy Australia conference in Melbourne on Tuesday, will promote the
Redback Generation 2 Smart Hybrid Solar Inverter System to EnergyAustralia’s
1.7 million customers in Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, the ACT and
South Australia.
It is the first major
initiatives of the newly established New Energy division from EnergyAustralia,
and follows similar investments in new technologies from its major utility
rivals. It sees the technology as the launching pad for new innovations such as
peer-to-peer trading, where households sell electricity to each other rather
than back to the grid.
The inverter includes Redback’s
cloud enabled intelligent system for analytics and remote control, the Ouija
Board, which gives homeowners and commercial users energy management options
through a smart device.
The technology uses machine learning
to gather intelligence over time, learning from user preferences as well as
drawing data from external factors like the weather.
As well as allowing non-solar
customers to better use electricity and appliances more efficiently, the
technology aims to bring the environmental and economic benefits of rooftop
solar – and battery storage – to more Australian homes in the coming
months.
Redback, which is rapidly
transforming itself from a energy storage hardware company to an energy
management software company, says it was chosen by EnergyAustralia for the
investment due to its experience and achievements in both of those areas.
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Redback’s solar inverter system is scalable,
easy to install – about an hour’s work for a qualified electrician, according
to EnergyAustralia – and offers what Redback says is a faster return on
investment than other competitors in the market.
The software platform can be run
from a smart phone and is also battery and solar panel agnostic, which means it
works with existing systems.
Redback’s founder and managing
director Philip Livingston says the investment will grow the company’s
Australian team exponentially – with 80 per cent of the new jobs created in
Brisbane – and allow it to continue developing smarter technologies.
“We’ll be hiring effectively a
developer a week, or more,” Livingston told RE on the sidelines of the
conference on Tuesday.
“We”re currently a team of 27 in
Australia and about 5 overseas and … we’ll be consistently growing from now on.
“As a start-up you have limited
ability to bring change to a market because you’re under-resourced. …Having a
conversation with (EnergyAustralia) was a natural step.
“Our partnership with EnergyAustralia
significantly accelerates Redback’s technology roadmap and strategic plan for
leading the disruptive change required for mass adoption of renewables,”
Livingston said.
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“EnergyAustralia’s got millions of
customers and they’re as committed as we are about bringing the change that we
want to see in the grid, to the grid.
“This is all about, effectively,
building out …our software roadmap, that brings in a range of technologies that
… underpin the transformation of the grid from relying on centralisation to
decentralised renewables.
“It’s also giving the consumer
greater choice in where they source their energy and how, and making that
process seamless,” he said.
“The technologies that we’re
building put the consumers first in having ultimate choice in how they use
their system and providing a much better degree of optimisation of
self-consumption and utilisation of smarts in the home and aggregate smarts
between devices outside the home.”
Andrew Perry, EnergyAustralia
Executive – Next Gen, said the investment reflected the energy retailer’s
commitment to giving consumers more control over their energy consumption in
ways that help households save money and reduce carbon emissions.
“We know electricity costs are a
concern for many households and the ability to manage consumption is a key to
keeping bills low,” he said.
“For us, this was always an
investment around giving out customers the ability to take control and manage
their own energy consumption and usage and do it in an affordable way.
“With the Redback system the
customer can make the most of the energy captured on their own roof tops – they
decide if they want to use the energy right away, store that energy or even
sell it to the electricity grid.”
In the future, he told RE at the
conference, it would offer solar customers peer-to-peer trading opportunities,
as well as opportunities to sell their solar energy back to the grid.
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“The thing about this is that the
technology and the solution software is simple and can be updated and
programmed remotely, which the Redbank team will do.
“And the customer data is clearly
important to us, to see how they’re using their appliances, how efficient they
are, to help them become more efficient.
“It’s also smart enough, in terms of
the software, that it can pick up weather forecasts and weather patterns, to
optimise …energy management.
For the customer, he says, this
means they’re saving money by using their solar more optimally, and they don’t
need to spend so much money on big battery systems.
“They can invest less and be much
more efficient, and then, because it’s plug and play they can add another
battery whenever they want.”
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