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Building digital foundations for a more dynamic distribution network

Essential Energy is a utilities company that operates one of Australia’s largest electricity distribution networks, and Essential Water, which provides water and wastewater services in New South Wales.

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Project Highlights

  • 950k+ connection points migrated in just 17 months from kick off
  • 30%+ efficiency improvements through simplified billing processes and end-to-end automation, saving 3,000 business days on a single tariff change
  • Approx 75% fewer network/retailer billing disputes compared to the previous billing system
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Building capability for a changing energy system

As a Distribution Network Service Provider (DNSP), Essential Energy delivers reliable power to more than 950,000 customers across New South Wales and southern Queensland. To navigate rapid grid transformation, the business is continuing to build the capabilities needed to manage an increasingly dynamic and decentralised electricity network.

The boom in rooftop solar, home batteries and increasingly granular smart-meter data is creating more complex network connections. This makes accurate network billing harder for distribution networks, and demands innovative pricing solutions to keep customer costs down. To meet evolving market requirements and changing service expectations, Essential Energy needed a future-proof, end-to-end solution for both electricity and water operations. And that’s where we came in.

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Switching to a purpose-built operating system

Essential Energy partnered with Kraken to develop a modern billing and data platform designed to support the evolving needs of its electricity distribution and water business.

Kraken Distribution, our integrated platform for distribution, replaces a series of legacy systems and empowers Essential Energy to consolidate meter, asset, consumption, standing and customer data all in one place for faster problem solving, accurate billing, and more streamlined operations.

This sets the stage for rapid tariff innovation and more tailored customer comms, while simplifying the technology landscape and supporting implementation of evolving market and regulatory requirements. Essential Energy is positioned to unlock new AI and analytics use cases, leveraging the stable and trusted data foundations set in place with Kraken.

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This partnership represents an incredible opportunity for Essential Energy to build industry-leading software solutions with a global technology leader that can benefit customers across the distribution sector globally as the energy transition continues.

John Cleland, CEO, Essential Energy and Essential Water

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Delivering regulatory change (while migrating)

During the migration, Essential Energy and Kraken responded to significant changes in Australia’s National Electricity Market, including new requirements relating to the availability of power-quality data from smart meters.

Essential Energy continues to work with Kraken to implement the necessary regulatory changes as part of its core license with us – reducing the need to manage regulatory changes across multiple systems and service providers.

Boosting billing experiences

As tariff and metering complexity grows, Network billing has benefitted massively from a boost in data quality. Together with the teams at Essential Energy, we co-designed and implemented a new approach to support more accurate and efficient network billing.

By using the most accurate data available and reducing the number of unnecessary data transformations required to calculate actual charges, Essential Energy has now achieved near-perfect billing accuracy.

Efficiency in the metering and billing teams improved by 30+% during migration through simplified billing processes and end-to-end automation. The business saved 3,000 business days on a single tariff change, and reduced billing disputes by approximately 75%, compared to the previous billing system. 

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Essential Energy saved 3,000 business days on a tariff change affecting 74,000 meters

Innovative technology like Kraken’s plays a critical role in the energy transition because we're pushing new frontiers. We face increasing demands on our network and as a critical infrastructure provider. And so we need to have different ways of being able to meet those challenges.

Luke Jenner, Chief Assets and Digital Officer, Essential Energy

Success in delivery

  • Kraken provides the digital backbone for Essential Energy’s evolution into a modern DSO, and has earned widespread industry recognition and some impressive achievements, even during migration:

    • Migrated the first connection point to Kraken in just 4 months, and ~400k National Meter Identifiers (NMIs) in under two weeks at peak.
    • Migrated all of Essential Energy’s 950k+ connection points in 17 months.
    • Produced 2.7M+ invoices with a combined value of over AU$600M, during migration.
    • Performed the end-to-end Meter-to-Cash process for initial Essential Energy and Water customers one month ahead of schedule.
    • Implemented complex commercial & industrial tariffs (including all demand charges)
    • Improved the quality and availability of market data used for customer and invoicing calculations, ahead of schedule.
    • Reduced billing disputes by around 75%, and boosted efficiency by 30%+ through simplified billing processes.
    • Automated key industry processes (like customer transfer) using Kraken’s innovative Flow product.

Speak to the team