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 ‘Home Energy Management System’ or HEMS installed in their home. This tool is hardwired into your switchboard 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.

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 HEMS 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 off 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 with a bland-sounding name!

Don’t forget!

Our community solar roll out is coming very soon and will be available for anyone, not just in the 2515 postcode, and may even be relevant for those who currently have solar on their roofs.

Email us to stay in the loop electrify2515@gmail.com

Thanks to Jeremy Park for the photo from Coledale's Climate Action election forum in March