Iterative Product Delivery

Incite Energy’s mission: to incite real change in the world by accelerating the transition to a lower emissions future.

One way to a lower emissions future is to change how electricity is consumed. Incite Energy tackles this challenge directly and is proving it with their deployment of a smart grid solution to Norfolk Island.

Leveraging new renewable generation and storage infrastructure, in addition to smart meters and dynamic pricing driven by their own demand response algorithms, Incite Energy is enabling the island’s residents to more efficiently match energy demand with energy supply through control of residential energy storage systems.

The challenge

Batteries and controllable electrical loads at residential and small business premises can be leveraged to reduce the cost of electricity supply. Traditional engineering solutions seek direct control over consumer assets, failing to recognise the primacy of the consumer and their desire to control and prioritise devices in their domain.

Incite Energy’s system needed to enable automated and timely responses to dynamic pricing signals, thereby empowering consumers to control their devices in response to the needs of the Norfolk Island electricity grid.

Creating a remarkable user experience for residents, operators and installers

Following our Product Factory framework, JourneyOne facilitated product ‘ideation’, capturing a shared understanding of the features critical to success for island residents, grid operators and battery installers.

Moving to ‘iteration’ phase, we developed a series of product increments. With an initial proof-of-concept, we established the feasibility of secure and reliable remote access to battery telemetry and control of battery charge/discharge state. We then packaged battery control as a ‘service’ capable of responding to dynamic price signals and making battery information accessible to residents via Incite Energy’s customer portal. We finished by enabling installers to provision new battery installations to Norfolk Island’s smart grid.

Realising unexpected benefits

With the needs of their customers satisfied, Incite Energy have realised some unexpected benefits from both the solution and process by which it was developed. For instance, the clarity and shared understanding of Incite Energy’s business domain developed during ideation will expedite and improve future product development.

Leveraging our FlyApps application accelerator for AWS, JourneyOne could focus on iterative delivery of product features, not infrastructure. Our configuration of key services such as Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon SQS/SNS dynamically scales from no load to massive load without intervention and is fully-automated, enabling new deployments in minutes.

Through adoption of our cloud-native, serverless application patterns, the solution can be operated at very low cost and with minimal management overhead. Without additional development effort, our solution also provided levels of operational transparency and composability with other internal and external systems that surprised our client.