How AGL customers inspired a world-class tech platform

A clean slate

When our project was being developed, the first Powerwall hadn’t landed in Australia, solar was beginning to boom and batteries were still considered part of the future. That gave us the gift of a clean slate to work out what our centralised control system – a VPP platform – needed to be. 

By organising and consolidating the growing number of residential batteries in our VPP we could be better positioned to make use of the excess of energy generated during the day, and smooth out the troughs in supply at night when generation was lower and consumers arrived home from work and turned on their appliances. 

It was a bumpy journey. For a while – like everyone else – we thought a platform was the Big Red Button you could push to make a whole lot of batteries out in the field work together in concert, like an orchestra. 

 We quickly learned two valuable lessons that helped shaped our platform development:

1. The orchestra-themed naming convention for Consumer Energy Resources (CER) platforms is so 2016;  
2. If customers are at the heart of the transition to a more distributed energy system, they need to be at the heart of the software that enables it.

Customer-led innovation

We asked our customers what they understood about orchestration and what had inspired them to join. We learned they wanted us to:   

• Be clear and upfront about how we would manage their battery;  
• Provide them with the transparency to see that we were keeping our promises;  
• Simplify the complex.  

We learned, for example, that although we could optimise the control of a customer’s battery, solar system or Electric Vehicle (EV) charger to create new value, it resulted in an information asymmetry.

We have a cloud-based supercomputer doing our calculations for us, but how can a customer be expected to interpret what we’re doing? We thought it was unreasonable to expect a customer to need to calculate the impact of an orchestration event on their bill, and that the absence of this information would erode trust. 

We recognised that we needed to build a tool help us provide clarity for our customers on how we would control their devices. We needed something that translated our VPP agreement with the customer into a control strategy for the devices, making sure they got the value they were promised.  

That’s how NEO was born

NEO is the central software we use to control all our VPP assets, including solar, batteries and EV smart chargers. It does all the clever stuff: real-time monitoring of each asset with AI- driven optimisation and bidding of the fleet across multiple wholesale markets, considering weather data and market forecasting.  It currently processes more than six million data points every day (and it has a Big Red Button, of course).  

It also does some unique things, like calculating the bill impact (both positive and negative) of every command we send to a customer device. This seems obvious; but AGL is the only VPP provider that shares this information with customers in real time in our app so customers can see that we’re keeping our promise.

It’s a unique approach, but it shouldn’t be. We predict the market will eventually evolve to provide this as a minimum standard. Customers deserve transparency on how their device is being managed and what the benefit will be for them when they sign up. They shouldn’t be confused with complex tariff structures or be expected to take the risk on opaque ‘market participation’ rewards when they sign up for a VPP. Managing the risk and simplifying the offers is the responsibility of the retailer, not the customer. 

What’s next?

We’ve been powering Australian homes and businesses for over 180 years. We’re here to help you better understand your energy usage, and the energy market, putting the power in your hands. 

Our AGL app is part of that promise. From the palm of your hand, you can access your account to view plans, pay bills and track your energy usage.