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Advanced meters enable our energy retail customers to provide accurate billing information to their energy consumers. Increasingly, meter data is playing an important role in enabling benefits to the way people use and consume energy. Operationally, our metering business has continued to thrive as a market leader in Australasia over the past year. This is an achievement underpinned by an unwavering commitment to operational and customer service excellence supported by a strong health and safety focus. Expanding our metering fleet In the 12 months to 30 June 2020, we installed 36,350 advanced meters in New Zealand and 119,033 in Australia. Our advanced meter fleet across the two countries grew 10% to 1.71 million, from 1.56 million the year before. We have now deployed almost 280,000 advanced meters in Australia, having met the 250,000 milestone in April during the initial COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. In Australia, we are now averaging approximately 10,000 installations per month. Preparing for future growth Vector has continued to explore how next generation connectivity platforms
develop tailored products and energy management for their customers based on their energy consumption needs. The NEP will leverage AWS IoT Analytics, a fully-managed service that makes it easy to run and operationalise sophisticated analytics on large volumes of data to enable Vector Metering and its customers to develop insights on network performance to help plan energy networks, drive smarter investment decisions, and increase reliability for consumers. By increasing the capacity and rate of data collection, the NEP will also help Vector Metering deliver meter reporting from the current 30 minute to five minute intervals in Australia by 2021, as required by the Australian market rules. In the future, insights from the NEP will enable the market to develop innovative can further optimise our metering solutions and enable us to deliver even more value to our customers at scale. We have started multiple upgrade programmes across key service platforms to ensure we continue to meet the evolving needs of our customers. In the past year we announced a significant upgrade programme to replace all existing 2G modems with future proofed technology, which will support 4G and 5G technology as it becomes available. Once complete, this investment will clear the way for continued meter connectivity and enable ongoing product innovation opportunities decades into the future. Innovating for our customers In October 2019, Vector Metering announced a partnership with Genesis Energy to roll out advanced gas meters, making Genesis the first energy retailer in New Zealand to offer its customers a digital gas metering solution. This innovation will provide Genesis’ customers with the benefit of full visibility across their gas use at home, giving themmore freedom to make decisions about their energy usage long before their bill arrives. It will also avoid the need to have a meter reader visit the consumer’s property. Today Genesis has 110,000 natural gas customers across New Zealand who
could benefit from the solution. We are excited to be working with Genesis on this large deployment that will help them better manage their business and respond to their customers’ needs. Advancing operational excellence Over the past year we have continued to invest in the service delivery software and meter data processing capability which has enabled us to consistently outperform our service levels. These investments are driving efficiencies throughout our operations and enabling us to scale quickly while maintaining customer excellence and a strong health and safety focus.
Introducing the New Energy Platform The rise in renewable energy, growth in electric vehicles, and higher consumer expectations to make energy choices, require the energy industry to transform and harness the power of data to make
solutions and other new market models that accelerate the uptake of renewables and electric vehicles. Through the strategic alliance, Vector and AWS plan to assemble a highly skilled technology and engineering team in Auckland to co-develop the platform with our customers. This strategic alliance to jointly develop the NEP is the first of its kind for AWS in New Zealand, and for AWS in the global energy sector. The NEP is another step in our long-stated ambition to benefit our energy and utility customers, and ultimately consumers. As regulators in New Zealand and Australia request that data becomes more accessible, and with the exponential increase in the volume of data available, we will continue to lead with these types of partnerships.
smarter customer-centric decisions. Vector and Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced a global multi-year strategic alliance to jointly develop the New Energy Platform (NEP) – an Internet of Things (IoT) and analytics solution to enable the delivery of more affordable, reliable, and cleaner energy options to consumers. The initial focus of the NEP is to rapidly collect and analyse data frommore than 1.6 million Vector advanced meters that securely gather information on energy consumption across Australia and New Zealand. The insights collected by the NEP will help Vector Metering to enable energy and utility companies to
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