Insight & control behind the meter
Sophisticated energy management to put your customers back in control
Track spend against a baseline
Top-down or bottom-up baselining & tracking
Customers create a baseline from old bills or detailing all appliances in their site. This forms the basis on which consumption is tracked and can be refined over time by adding more appliance information. GreenBox then provides current, predicted and historic usage information in the context of the baseline. Overlaid with weather data your customers can spot trends versus their planned consumption so they can better manage their spend.
Granular insight, behind the meter
Monitor by circuit & appliance, by day, hour & minute
With monitoring and control of the major circuits and energy consuming appliances at a site, in time resolutions from a year down to a minute, GreenBox is able to provide detailed insight into consumption patterns without the need for a smart meter. Of course, GreenBox can also reconcile your meter readings with a bottom-up build of energy usage.
Deliver transparent spend analysis
Integrating tariffs & account fees gives a complete view of spend
Users can benefit from the most accurate and transparent view of their spend through the inclusion of tariff structures and account fees by utilities – no more estimates, no more waiting to find out how much they’ve spent.
Notifications
Timely, actionable alerts & recommendations
GreenBox’s notification system delivers urgent alerts like power outages or demand response events via SMS, email and social media channels. It also actively recommends changes in consumption behavior or upgrades to appliances that could be undertaken to save your customer money.
"What if?" mode
Understand the benefit of action in the context of planned energy spend
To help your customer understand the benefits of energy efficiency or load shifting “What if?” mode allows households to understand the benefits of changing behaviour in the context of their quarterly or annual spend. And with the ability to add in a ‘virtual appliance’ that isn’t controlled but can still be tracked, customers are able to get the most detailed view of where they can make savings.
Set-and-forget control
Automated energy management to create sustainable change
We’d all like to avoid running around after our family turning off power. GreenBox provides consumers with the ability to control appliances using a set-and-forget scheduler that helps create sustainable savings without the need for manual intervention.
Automated load-shifting
Intelligent, dynamic load control according to your customer's policies
GreenBox provides consumers with the ability to opt-in to utility demand curtailment events. The decision to participate can be automated, or require user authorization through the notification system and a clear indication of the financial benefit to the consumer. By providing an opt-in, utilities can avoid being seen as Big Brother and maximize firm commitments to load shedding events.
Online customer engagement
Engage, recruit & service new customers
Prospective customers can estimate their potential savings then be guided through an online energy plan registration process. Accounts can be integrated with utility billing applications to provide 24x7 account self-service and rich consumption insight.
Remote monitoring & control
Anytime, anyplace access to the GreenBox system
And of course, GreenBox’s objective is to help you put your customers in control so a user’s energy management portal can be accessed securely and remotely from any mobile device or PC.
Energy-as-an-asset
Buy it. Manage it. Sell it. Borrow it. Loan it. Donate it. Transfer it. Gift it. Hedge it.
Base-lining future energy consumption and wrapping a contract around it enables you to treat energy as an asset. This is a fundamental building block for new, innovative, smart energy business models.
GreenBox integrates energy management with a configurable smart energy business model to support innovative smart energy customer contracts that create a win-win for you and your customers.
GreenBox ServiceHub
Cloud-based utility apps & services enable your smart energy business model
Shape
Innovative customer contracts
Baselining your customer's projected energy consumption and household devices enables utilities to shape the load curves of individual customers, treating energy as an asset. You can then implement innovative contracts with configurable features that include:
- Services-based contracts (service subscriptions, account fees, pre-payment)
- Energy “caps” (fixed commitments, rolling commitments, sell-back excess energy, use-it-or-lose it)
- Multiple tariff structures (dynamic, fixed-price, tiered, feed-in)
- MoneyBox incentives, a place to reward your customers and track their savings.
Sculpt
Real-time customer information and analysis to supercharge your business
GreenBox aggregates data from all of your smart energy customers to give a complete picture of the historic, actual and planned consumption of your portfolio. And with the ability to perform real-time queries across all of your customer energy plan commitments, real-time energy market data, weather forecasts and live grid data, utilities can improve the accuracy of grid utilization, forward load curves and wholesale contracts.
Sell
Firm commitments to demand response & customer incentives
Real-time tracking of actual consumption versus baseline, combined with contractual commitments from customers to shift load brings accurate, firm, automated commitments to demand response events. This enables the optimization of hedge positions, the monetization of energy efficiency and reduction of peak loads.
Supported by GreenBox alerts and home automation, utilities can explain the benefits of an incentive to increase take up. Customer incentives might include profit share for spot-market peak shedding, energy efficiency bonuses or dynamic tariffs to promote load shifting. Incentives can be opt-in or automatic and all money saved is tracked in the customer’s MoneyBox so they can see the accumulated benefits of their service.
Service
Differentiate your business with improved customer service
GreenBox helps you deliver accurate, transparent billing information to improve customer service levels. GreenBox can be integrated with your existing billing systems to provide rich customer relationship management, and can be deployed with or without smart meters to enable you to validate your meter data and improve the accuracy of bills. And with the ability to monitor outages you can actively measure and manage grid service level performance and its impact on your customers.
Extend customer lifecycles with new offerings
Electricity. Gas. Water. CO2. Distributed generation. Battery storage. EVs.
With the ability to understand how your consumer is using energy you can target value-add new services at the right customers. And with the ability to monitor and manage any resource you can think of and intelligently schedule consumption, GreenBox enables you to expand your product offerings into new areas and even play arbitrage between different resource types.
Expand your addressable markets
Multi-property accounts & sub-metering
GreenBox lets your customers manage multiple properties and sub-meter buildings or precincts to enable you to grow your addressable market into the highest revenue customers.
Move into smart home services
Game changing partnerships with smart home providers
GreenBox's apps runs on a range of smart home devices including gaming platforms and digital TV boxes. Strike up innovative partnerships to improve customer acquisition and retention.
Out-of-the-box. Scalable. Secure. Extensible.
Accelerate your entry into Smart Energy
 Lowest TCO crowd computing |
 Out-of-the-box energy management |
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 Rapid customization & app development |
Crowd computing
Host your data & apps where they’re needed most
GreenBox’s crowd computing architecture distributes the user's data and apps to a smartbox computer in the site. This enables granular energy management and enterprise grade scalability, performance and security with the lowest total cost of ownership compared to traditional gateway or purely cloud based architectures.
Scalability
Crowd computing is the answer to exponential data growth
Delivering insightful energy management requires appliance level monitoring in time intervals that could be a small as a minute – a significant data storage challenge for utilities. GreenBox delivers the lowest TCO smart energy architecture by storing data and applications on a smartbox in the site and periodically rolling up backups to the cloud where GreenBox ServiceHub utility applications can use it.
Improved app performance
Crowd computing improves quality of service
Distributing data into also avoids the inherent latency of purely cloud-based energy management systems by allowing your customer to directly interact with the smartbox through their web-based dashboard. GreenBox helps you avoid constant communications with backend servers via the Internet and ensures your customers enjoy enterprise grade quality of service, regardless of their Internet provider!
Security & Privacy
A dedicated cloud gateway provides the most secure smart energy solution
Security and the NAT traversal problem are a major limitation for implementing purely cloud-based smart energy solutions. Either you leave a port open making it vulnerable to cyber-attacks or you close it down and make it near to impossible to access the site in real-time from the cloud. GreenBox uses sophisticated network management to enable robust security whilst resolving NAT traversal problems. This solution also reduces the cost of network infrastructure required in the cloud for secure communications.
GreenBox Heartbeat
Self-healing systems management & resilience
The GreenBox Heartbeat applications reside in the home on the smartbox to constantly monitor the performance of energy management services. Heartbeat will automatically restart processes, applications and hardware to enable recovery from crashes, power failures or interruptions. In the cloud GreenBox Heartbeat tools also enable remote updates to firmware and applications across an entire deployment of Smart Energy customers. This self-healing system ensures maximum up time and a quality of service expected in our hi-tech world.
Home networking
Out-of-the-box
Wireless Home Area Network (HAN) management comes out-of-the-box in GreenBox allowing easy integration of new ZigBee® enabled devices, appliances and smart meters into the GreenBox HAN. Central to GreenBox Proximity is a smartbox, a powerful computer with integrated ZigBee® gateway, local data storage, in-site energy management applications and connectivity to circuits, appliances and smart meters.
Granular insight
... without smart meters
GreenBox Octopussy monitors and controls all of the main circuits in a home with greater accuracy than smart meter technology. Behind it is a range of smart plugs, power boards, relays and smart devices to enable the control of major energy consuming appliances and consumer electronics. And as more ZigBee® devices hit the market GreenBox’s open APIs will allow for control of more appliances.
Auto-device detection
Plug-and-play new devices
GreenBox automatically detects and connects to new wirelessly controllable appliances in the home so your customers can just plug-in and monitor their energy usage for GreenBox compatible devices.
Direct dashboard access
Minimise application latency
In the field, GreenBox enables direct access to applications and data served from its onboard webserver to reduce the latency of going back to a central cloud. This also enables the system to continue to operate whilst the Internet network to the user is down or slow and ensures your customers enjoy the highest quality of service.
GreenBox Energy Guru
Rule-based load control
Highlighting excessive usage, calculating the benefits of shifting or reducing load, tracking savings over time, GreenBox Energy Guru take the pain out energy management. Energy Guru is an intelligent appliance scheduler with a rule-based engine that triggers devices to be activated or deactivated at specific times, or on user or utility defined events. With set-and-forget energy management your consumers can maximize the benefits of energy automation by instituting behavioural change.
Alerts & messaging
Configurable notification system
GreenBox's notification system enables consumers to configure thresholds and alerts to make sure they stay within consumption targets. Alerts are delivered via the consumer’s GreenBox dashboard, email, SMS and social media channels. The same notification system can be used by utilities to deliver, energy efficiency advice, promotions and demand response incentives, ensuring you’re always connected to your customers.
Consistent, accurate data
Slice & dice data any way you like
GreenBox Affinity Data Management cleanses, transforms, repairs and manages data from a multitude of smart devices, appliances and meters. Affinity automatically rolls up measurements by time (minutes into hours into days into weeks into months into years), formulae, by room or managed area, and by reticulation network (a building's electricity, gas or water network). This powerful data management suite allows smart home data to be sliced and diced to form consistent, meaningful information for your customers. Affinity also intelligently backs-up data to the cloud to efficiently manage the challenge of storing vast amounts of appliance data and allows near real-time interrogation of all of the customers’ sites in your smart energy portfolio.
Extensible data model for the smart utility
Sophisticated data analysis for any kind of resource
The underlying data model in GreenBox Affinity maps the complex relationships between devices and circuits in homes, your customer’s data and the relationships between all of the assets you control using GreenBox in the grid. And the ‘reticulation network’ that models electricity circuits and devices can be used to represent and manage any resource (electricity, gas, water, CO2) or device providing a powerful structure on which to interrogate data and grow your smart utility business.
Blueprint buildings not networks
Meaningful insight for your customers
Whilst reticulation networks capture the underlying relationships between circuits and devices, GreenBox also provides a real world blueprint of buildings. Customers can interrogate their data by rooms, buildings, precints. And building managers can apportion costs to the right people to enable accurate sub-metering or properties.
Modular & future proof
Plug-and-play new wireless gateways as standards develop. The GreenBox communications architecture is modular enabling the substitution of non-ZigBee® HAN gateways.
Cross-platform support
GreenBox runs on Linux® so our software stack can be readily ported to any device that has a minimum supported hardware configuration. This means your energy management service can operate on PCs, laptops, personal video recorders and gaming platforms opening up a new world of opportunity in the Smart Home.
Custom utility apps
An open, rapid application development framework
Application performance is enhanced in GreenBox by combining rich user experience web programming languages like PHP and HTML 5 with C/C++ programs in the embedded environment (HAN). In addition to configuring and white labeling the customer dashboard, our open architecture allows utilities to exploit public API’s (Application Programming Interfaces) and XML formats to develop new applications to differentiate their offerings. To support the customization of our apps, GreenBox has an integrated development framework which allows for the rapid build, testing and deployment of applications into this embedded and web-based architecture.