Smart Energy Apps
Many of us receive our quarterly energy bills and, after we’ve picked ourselves up off the floor, take a stab in the dark to work out which appliances or behaviours are causing the high energy usage and what we could do to lower our bills. There really isn’t much transparency or power given to householders to accurately track and therefore manage our energy. With energy prices skyrocketing, coupled with a need to drastically reduce carbon emissions, it’s the perfect time to become empowered energy users.
If you have installed solar panels and downloaded an app that shows when you are producing energy from your roof and when appliances in your house are using that energy or drawing from the grid, you are on your way to having a better understanding of your energy patterns. Some of you may be even further along the path and set a timer on your hot water system so it does most of the heating when you produce solar, or when energy prices are lower. However, there are still so many unknowns about the precise sources of our energy patterns and little control over them.
Reducing costs
Imagine if we lived in homes where we could see how much energy our air conditioner was using in real-time and then turn it down using our phone. In our proposed pilot, participants would have a sophisticated smart energy app or ‘Home Energy Management System’ installed in their home. This tool is hardwired into your switchboard and connected to a dashboard on your phone or computer, allowing you to monitor and control many of your appliances and even automate it to time best with solar production. Having accurate real-time knowledge of your energy patterns puts you in control and can help reduce your bills.
What’s a smart energy app?
Smart energy apps pull data from a piece of hardware that’s installed in your electrical switchboard so you can optimise your energy use in real time via an app, such as this one from Clipsal.
Planning for the future
If our pilot goes ahead, not only can we improve our individual circumstances, we will be leading the world in becoming a smart energy community. That is by having a lot of smart energy apps in place, we can build knowledge of how an entire community uses energy and therefore better understand the impact on the grid and plan for the electric future. This is especially important as more and more people switch out their polluting gas appliances and adopt electric vehicles. It’s really exciting to think of all the unlocked knowledge and therefore power we will gain as a community with a pocket-sized piece of technology!
