Indigo Power tracks where energy is coming and going from within a hub. If your neighbour has been importing electricity, at the same time as you have been exporting electricity from your solar power system, we say this energy has been shared.
A community energy hub is a community or town working together to create and share electricity. Indigo Power customers can generate electricity and share it with their neighbours, and we’ll be building larger solar and battery projects to supply communities with top-up power. Every community energy hub remains connected to the Australian electricity network, so you’ve always got power when you need it.
Your energy hub consists of all the Indigo Power customers in your local community.
Electricity imported from, or exported to, other electricity grid participants. This is electricity coming from outside the community energy hub, or leaving the hub.
Renewable energy shared with larger community renewable energy assets. These include our community-scale renewable energy generation and storage facilities.
Renewable energy shared with other community hub members. These are your neighbours, houses in your wider community and shops.
No, energy sharing is not reflected on your bill. You can view the amount of energy shared across your hub in your Indigo Power online portal. However, the price for the electricity we supply remains the same whether it’s been shared or not.
No, energy sharing is not the same as energy trading. Whereas energy trading attempts to set up a financial transaction between individuals, you’ll be sharing energy across your whole community.
Energy sharing isn’t free, but when you share energy within your community energy hub, you’ll be receiving Indigo Power’s best electricity prices for the electricity you import, and our best feed-in tariff for any solar power you export.
Whilst energy sharing isn’t reflected on your bill, we expect that more locally generated renewable energy will continue to push the price of electricity down; meaning lower electricity bills. And because we’re paying for locally generated electricity, we know that more of our electricity bill will be kept in our communities. In the meantime, you know we’ll always be striving to get you the best electricity prices we possibly can.
Yes, all ‘other’ power imported by Indigo Power is Carbon Offset.
A kilowatt hour is a measure of energy. One kilowatt hour (1kWh) is equal to 1000 watts sustained for 1 hour. A megawatt is 1000 kilowatts.
Home hot water units can use a lot of electricity, and are programmed to switch on in the middle of the night, typically between 11:00pm-2:00am.
As a first preference, excess energy generated within the hub is shared amongst other members of the community energy hub. When there’s a surplus of electricity generated within the hub, and other members of the hub are not consuming enough to use it all, then this excess is reported as being exported back to the grid. We’ll continue to work on battery storage solutions so as to store this excess solar energy, for consumption later in day. If you know of any households or businesses that use electricity during the day, ask them to sign up and we can share more locally generated energy with those who need it.
The energy sharing display is connected to a software program that analyses all of the data in your hub: that’s a lot of data! The long load times reflect the time taken for your portal to ‘wake up’ this software so that it can run the required analysis and transmit back to your portal.