Kerry Bradbury’s three adult children are still occasional tenants in her Chifley home in Sydney’s south-eastern suburbs.

And like countless Australians, she’s been feeling the sting of soaring electricity prices.

“It got to the stage where you’re actually afraid to open your electricity bill,” Ms Bradbury says.

“Especially with the transient kids, definitely.

“I could get one bill for electricity, which would be around the $600, $700 mark.

“If I had one, two, three [kids] here over summer, the bills could be as high as $2,000.”

To deal with the shock, a couple of years ago Kerry Bradbury took a radical step — she installed batteries, new solar panels and a heap of smart tech in her home.

It wasn’t cheap, costing her $28,000.

But thanks to that tech and the small retailer that coordinates it for her, she won’t have to pay a power bill for seven years.

“All of it’s automated,” Ms Bradbury explains.

“Me being an average person, I don’t have time to try and work out what’s the best price, when’s the best price to be using it.

Sitting on a gold mine

While Kerry Bradbury is grateful for someone taking over to generate savings for her, she’s actually paying to hand over control of an asset that has huge money-making potential.

Australia’s energy authorities envision a world where smart, clean tech — from solar panels and batteries to electric vehicles to pool pumps, air conditioners and heat pumps — can help prop up the grid while slashing consumers’ bills.

The smart technology behind those devices enables them to be turned on and off, up and down through software platforms known as home energy management systems.

And the ability to control households’ energy systems is becoming an increasingly valuable asset to the grid and power companies.

“A rooftop solar system coupled with a small-scale battery installation can make a meaningful difference to a single household’s energy bill,” the Australian Energy Regulator wrote in its most recent state of the energy market report.

“But aggregated across thousands of households, these technologies can enhance system reliability and security.”

That potential could be used to soak up excess electricity when there is too much solar power in the system and not enough demand.

Or it could be used to provide electricity to the grid when there isn’t enough solar and there’s too much demand.

Thousands of households like Kerry’s being able to work together to reduce demand or feed power into the grid is a powerful tool that the energy market would be happy to pay for.

The data holds the key

But what underpins the ability to allow households to work together for the grid is data collected by the smart meter attached to your power box.

Kerry Bradbury’s smart meter shows exactly how she’s using power and when she’s using it — a valuable insight for authorities running the grid and anyone trying to save or make money from the electricity market.

But it’s not clear whether she owns this data. Smart meter rollouts are controlled by energy retailers, and a few companies are responsible for most of the installations.

If the householder doesn’t pay for their own smart meter, the data showing how and when they use power, among other valuable insights, is effectively owned by the company that provided the smart meter.

If Kerry wants to sell the ability to feed power back to the grid to a company, they are going to have to go through whoever owns the smart meter.

Douglas McCloskey, from the Justice and Equity Centre, is sceptical about the supposed benefits for consumers under the current system.

“Consumers do have a right to access that data, but it’s quite complicated and clunky,” he said.

He says the metering companies’ effective control over consumers’ data can make it extremely difficult for anyone else to use that information.

This, Mr McCloskey notes, would make it all but impossible for third parties such as aggregators or small electricity retailers to provide services to punters unless the customer is able to afford an entirely new, and extra, smart meter.

“In a lot of cases, there’s potential for the meter and what it can do and the data that comes through it to be controlled by metering providers,” he says.

“Where there aren’t any explicit provisions, it’s possible for metering providers to do things that aren’t technically illegal but wouldn’t necessarily be in the consumer’s best interest.”

Shutting out competition

Jonathan Jutsen, the founder of consultancy Energetics, says it is imperative that regulators prevent “walled gardens”, a term that refers to the practice by technology companies of closing access to a platform so they can profit from the data.

A well-known example for this is Apple, which is unwilling to share its systems — from messaging to video-calling — with other tech providers.

“That is surely what regulators are there for — to protect consumers’ interests.”

According to Mr McCloskey, the stakes are high.

He says the great prize of the energy transition is smarter and cleaner power that can cut bills and hand greater control to consumers.

But he warns this prize is likely to remain out of reach for most households unless yawning gaps in the regulations covering the smart meter market can be plugged.

As it currently stands, Mr McCloskey says the market is only likely to serve the interests of the metering providers and their retailer customers.

“And there’s the potential we won’t have the full range of services that some consumers may want and the protections for data and information that consumers need.”

‘Conflict of interest’

Giving consumers greater control of their own data and real-time access to it would be a good start, he says.

He says it should be entirely up to consumers to decide who — or which company — can use their data to provide them energy services.

Sydney householder Kerry Bradbury agrees.

She questions how metering companies can best serve consumers’ interests when their own customer is the power retailer.

how metering companies can best serve consumers’ interests when their own customer is the power retailer.

In her opinion, the “conflict of interests” seems obvious.

“They [the metering companies] can’t be dealing with the little person like me … and the bigger players in the system,” Ms Bradbury says.

“This is where there has to be a regulator of some kind to step in and stop anyone dominating the market.”

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