Why energy portals will save you money.

Energy portals will save you money! - How?  Well, you'll simply be more informed as a consumer to enable you to take action to reduce your energy consumption and costs. Let me show you how I have benefited from the use of an Energy Portal.

As background information here is my setup at home;

• I had a smart meter installed in October 2011
• I had solar panels installed at the same time. Its a 2.2kw system
• I live in a two story house and have 3 young kids
• We have gas central heating downstairs and rely on electric heaters upstairs.
• We have an air conditioner in the kids play room we use maybe 5 nights a year.
• We have gas hot water and cooking.

While Brave continues to enhance its energy portal, I get the advantages of using its features before anyone else to better understand how I use energy.

Here is my monthly energy data for 2012

(The drop in usage in May was because we were on holidays at this time).

So with this information what can I determine.

We have seasonal consumption. That is, Winter is when our demand is highest. This is because our children have radiator heating on in winter. Also, its clear the solar panels (in yellow) don't offset our consumption as significantly as in Summer due to lower generation.

So this information was great for an overview of my consumption but how did I manage to lower my bill?.
Well it was two fold - using the portal's Time Of Use (TOU) analysis tools I could see that by moving to an peak/off-peak offer I would save a lot of money. My year to date TOU split for standard peak/off-peak products (where peak is 7am-11pm Mon-Fri) looks like this.

So some quick maths based solely on consumption and peak only v peak/off-peak looked like this

Old Energy Rates - Peak only 24c/kwh
New Energy Rates - Peak 28.5c/kwh, Off-Peak 12c/kwh

Old Contract 24c x 4862.49 = $1167
New Contract 12c x 2896.72 + 28.5c x 1965.77 = $347.61 (off peak) + $560.24 = $907.85

So that's a difference of $259.15 or a saving of 22%

What's interesting however is that once we knew we were on TOU pricing my behaviour changed. I'm generally up late - past 11pm so by turning on the dishwasher at 11pm rather than at the normal time around 8pm after dinner, we were only paying 12c per kilowatt rather than 28.5c (or 24c on our old non-TOU rates). Suddenly the cost of the wash had halved.

The big savings happened when we delayed turning the heating up in the kids room. Turning them up at 11pm instead of immediately at 7:30 when they went to bed meant our heating costs would also drop dramatically. You can see this behaviour in this graph.

The increase at 8pm is the heating on low, the jump in usage at 11pm is the heating ramping up to a more warmer temperature, it ramps down during the night as the rooms reach set temperature. In this scenario almost 80% of our consumption is in off-peak - so 80% of the time i'm paying 12c/kwh instead of my old contract rate of 24c/kwh. On this day off-peak cost $2.79, peak cost $1.65 and we received feed-in tariffs (60c) of $1.94.- total cost for day was therefore $2.50 rather than $5.04 on the peak only product. A whopping 50% saving!

So with a little bit more insight into my energy costs, my usage patterns and some quick analysis is was able to lower my energy bills significantly.

Being able to look at the portal each day kept me motivated. I could see my behaviour changes being reflected in our consumption profile and I could therefore see how that affected my costs. That's the big difference in my opinion. Getting a bill each quarter is simply not enough of a signal to change behaviour. Yes, you probably get that initial bill shock when you open it, but after a week its forgotten. Portals give you up to date information, they'll even send you weekly emails outlining your current charges, you'll know how much your bill is before your retailer even sends it.

There is a lot of information on the web - studies have found that by simply providing users with this sort of detail and making slight adjustments to behaviour which don't alter a consumer's "quality of life", a 15% saving in consumption is easily achievable. I can confirm that this is my personal experience. In fact, combining consumption reductions with "peak-shifting" when on TOU tariffs, at least a 25% cost reduction is possible.

Brave believes greater savings are possible, just imagine a portal where you didn't even need to perform the above "geek-like" analysis, a portal which did it for you, which used your energy data and your appliance level data to understand your behaviour and then told you how much you could save by making small adjustments. Imagine it did this in real-time - Well at Brave, this is just one of the cool technologies we are developing.

Ps. Thanks to all of the people who visited the Brave stand to see some of this stuff in action at the Smart Utilities conference in Melbourne. We've had a fabulous response from the show already which is very encouraging.

Regards,

Trent Jenkins
CTO Brave Energy Systems