About 21,000 of Genesis Energy’s home customers have tried its online energy usage monitoring facility, in the month since the state-owned generator and power retailer officially launched the service.
The service is available only to customers who have an “advanced” meter fitted – with 150,000 currently installed.
It allows users to see energy usage in time-slices of an hour or more, presented as a graph, histogram or table on the web.
At this stage, however, the opportunity to make savings as a result of monitoring is limited. Genesis expects to deploy differential tariffs before the end of the year, allowing customers to defer heavy consumption to a cheaper period; but it cannot name a date by which this might happen, spokesman Richard Gordon says.
“We are working on a new tariff and a number of products to enable it, but it is a complex process, which also involves the power-line companies,” Gordon says.
The monitoring facility sits within an online “My Account” section on the Genesis website. The rest of this section, allowing bills to be read and paid on line, has been available for a few years.
Registering is a simple process, handicapped only by the length of the 10-digit consumer number and 16-character alphanumeric “ICP number” by which you identify yourself to the system. After the registration process users can choose their own user-name and password.
The graph displayed has pull-down calendars available for quick setting of dates, though it does not provide data for the previous three days before the date of inquiry.
The data can be imported into an Excel spreadsheet for storage on a home PC, while clicking on any day yields a further breakdown into hourly energy usage.
To date usage appears light as the 21,000 customers who accessed the facility between March 15 and April 14 only accounted for 60,000 page views in total, according to Genesis.