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Please Welcome – Chronical

Energetiq is super excited to welcome Chronical into the Energetiq family of products. This is our 7th product for the Australian energy industry, and it’s rapidly becoming one of our favourites.

We love it for the underlying tech ( that’s who we are, we get excited about that stuff ), we love it for the beautiful designs, but mostly we love the possibilities this opens up our customers.

First, some background

On November 2017, AEMC (Australian Energy Market Commission) announced that electricity spot prices for settlement periods will be moving from 30 minute intervals to 5 minute intervals.

This change is referred to in the industry as 5MS and is currently scheduled for industry rollout in the next year or two.

According to the AEMC, it will:

• Encourage investment in fast response technologies (batteries or new generation gas peaker plants for example)
• Reduce the time interval for financial settlement
• In the long term lower the cost of wholesale electricity prices which is anticipated to ultimately lower the electricity bills for consumers and businesses throughout Australia.

5MS promises to be one of the biggest changes across the industry in recent years. It affects several areas of the electricity industry such as networks, retailer and generators, and more. But the biggest impact will likely be in areas of Information Technology. Many systems will require enhancements to support up to six times more data within the same time frames. It’s an easy claim to make that this program will create quite a big data challenge within the market.

Big data challenge, bring it on!

Rather than see this as a concern, we see this as a huge opportunity. Aligning our expertise within the industry with great software engineering practices, we not only support the upcoming changes but lay the foundation for future innovations in our front line reconciliation tools.

Our analysis has shown that validation of usage information on a network charge has one of the highest yielding returns of all validation checks within NBV. So a meter data repository seems a natural fit alongside other Energetiq reconciliation products.

That’s where Chronical comes in…

I’m pleased to announce that we have now released the first version of Chronical, our brand new meter data repository. Chronical is capable of ingesting all NEM12 and NEM13 files from all markets within Australia (including WA).

The primary value of this data is driving reconciliation outcomes in Quantify and NBV ( reducing our customer’s costs ). The secondary value is allowing for really powerful access to the detailed consumption information. It should be able to answer questions such as;

• What’s the consumption for this NMI at between 3pm and 3:05 on Thursday April 23rd?
• What’s the consumption for this TNI in July 2020?
• What’s the consumption for the state of Victoria during April 2020?
• And finally – what’s the consumption profile for a customer that has 800 sites during the 2019 calendar year?

Traditional metering repositories are either expensive, or slow, or both. We really want this to be as fast as possible.

So How Fast is it?

And it’s super fast! From the start of the project, we set a benchmark for performance. Actually, we set a ridiculous benchmark.

Chronical should be able to load one year of metering data for the entire Australian market in under 24 hours.

Ridiculous Energetiq Benchmark for Performance

No really, how fast is it?

There’s only one way to find out. We created market realistic NEM12s and NEM13s for 10 million NMIs, for the full 12 months. Some 60 day reads, some 90 day reads. Both NEM12s and NEM13s will be profiled as per market rules.

In case you were wondering, that’s about 900 GB of meter reads as input to the test. That’s a lot right?

So how did Chronical go?

Chronical loaded all of this data within 24 hours. Every NMI was profiled into 5 minute intervals.

Mission accomplished! Yes, Chronical smashed it!

Lastly – Chronical’s been designed so that it can scale easily to the load coming its way. If we had 10M NMIs for two years ( so double the size of the test ), Chronical can still load in under 24 hours.

What’s in a name?

We spent more time than we should finding a better name than the original boring working title of ‘Metering Data Repository’. We really wanted the name to represent what is is – time + energy / consumption.

Chronicle ( note spelling ) is a frequent name of a local newspaper, and is often defined as “a factual written account of important or historical events in the order of their occurrence“
Calorie – is a basic unit of energy, shortened by us to ‘cal’

So we put the two together – and we have a “factual account of historical energy consumption events in the order of their occurrence.”

And that’s what Chronical actually is.

Last Word

At Energetiq, our primary goal is to be the best at one thing, energy reconciliations. So more than just loading the meter reads, Chronical enables us to integrate this data with our other products by providing beautiful energy usage data for validation of network charges, AEMO market invoices, or even revenue assurance.

Reach out to us today to see how Chronical can help with reconciliation needs or help in your 5MS compliance obligations.