Nemy: Telling You When Electricity Is Green (And Cheap)

Take a couple of electrical engineers sharing a home, add lockdown boredom, and what you might get is a nifty way of using electricity market information to help customers consume electricity when it’s green. And where their electricity retailer passes on real time wholesale electricity prices, cheap.

Meet nemy, the brainchild of Samuel Poustie and Jarman Stephens. Their offering starts very simple: the most basic being an If This Then That (IFTTT) integration in conjunction with the free IFTTT phone app that will tell you when renewable sources dominate the grid, according to AEMO’s five-minute updates.

When lockdown started in Melbourne last year, they’d just switched the energy provider in their shared rental to Amber Electric. With a provider that provides the wholesale price, they decided,

“let’s try and get some visibility into that price.”

It started with getting a smart light globe to go green when it was a good time to use power, and red when there was a price spike, Poustie explained. A price spike is also often indicative of more fossil-fuel generation entering the mix.

From there, the next step was to look at AEMO data, which publishes price and dispatch on all generators on a five minute cycle.

“We go and scrape that information, it’s very convoluted and not very user-friendly, and turn that into useful things for people. For Amber customers, price, but for a lot of other customers, the very important thing is the amount of renewables in the grid.

So we look at the fuel source – coal will get a cross, solar will get a tick, wind will get a tick – and no matter what retailer they’re with, they can still get that indication of what the carbon impact is of using electricity at every five minute block”, Stephens explained.

For the more adventurous customer, the IFTTT integration lets more advanced users take nemy’s information and utillise it as a control system for their smart appliances.

Stephens gives his own fairly straightforward use of nemy: a cheap smart plug operates the dishwasher when the grid is green, and another controls the washing machine.

“Quite recently, there was a price spike in the five-minute update, so the dishwasher turned off for five minutes, waited, and turned back on. It feels quite futuristic,” he said.

The Proposition For Solar Installers

Other customers are using nemy plus ITTT for more advanced load-shifting – pouring electrons into their EV batteries when the grid’s green, for example.

Stephens pointed out the other aspect of nemy’s approach is their decision to use existing systems like Amazon Alexa and Google Home,

“rather than developing our own ecosystem, where you need a box, pay $1,000, and you need an electrician to put it in the switchboard.”

There’s also a pretty straightforward proposition installers could take advantage of here: doing the setup for solar customers like “my clueless friend Chris”, who would like to have load shifting and/or time shifting taken care of, but don’t have the early adopters’ enthusiasm for tinkering with their systems.

“We’ve thought about teaming up with installers, because the type of customer installing solar would be interested in the type of electricity they’re using”, Stephens said; adding that it would be “exciting” to team up with installers.

“But we’re also trying to go mass market here, to push into the millions of Australians. You can get started with just your phone, and it’s free. So you just get notified when it’s really cheap and green, so people can then, without any devices and any setup, get notified that now is a great time to wash their underpants and hang them on the line”, Stephens said.

And while other electricity retailers may not provide the detailed information Amber Electric does, no matter what retailer a customer is with, nemy can tell them the carbon impact of using electricity in each five minute block through the day.

Original Source: https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/nemy-electricity-iftt-app/