Asia Energy market’s pursuit for a trillion megabyte technology

Geoff Childs, General Manager Asia, Gentrack

Asia stands at the forefront of the global drive towards net zero emissions, showcasing unparalleled dynamism and forward-thinking in its energy sector. 

Unlike regions opting for deregulation, Asia has chosen to focus on its own energy transitions. While this might seem contrary to traditional beliefs in capitalism and competition, this approach offers Asia a distinct advantage—a unified decision-making body responsible for rolling out smart meters, upgrading grids, installing rooftop solar panels, rapidly adopting household batteries, and deploying electric vehicle (EV) charging points backed by time-of-use (TOU) tariffs. 

This centralised strategy appears to be more efficient than a potentially chaotic, deregulated competitive market, making it the right choice for Asia. 

However, the challenge facing large-scale energy distribution and retail companies in Asia is significant. The sheer volume of customers they need to support, coupled with the exponential increase in data volumes due to smart meter deployment, poses a daunting task. 

Billing lies at the core of utility operations. It ensures revenue flow, essential for providing services. But billing has evolved; it’s now complex, involving various energy sources, dynamic pricing, and customer-specific packages. With customers producing their own energy, storing it in batteries, or even selling it back to the grid, accurate billing has become crucial. 

In this evolving landscape, questions arise: Can technology process and produce accurate bills fast enough? What margin of error can we tolerate? 

Some energy companies in Asia serve tens of millions of customers with complex tariffs, requiring multiple computations for accurate billing. Moreover, they now need to incorporate solar energy tariffs, EV TOU tariffs, battery storage fees, weighted average pricing, and discharge transactions—all presented to the average consumer in an easily understandable format, potentially in real time. 

Having worked closely with several large-scale energy companies across Asia, I’m pleased to report that we’ve exceeded their scalability requirements by a significant margin. 

We recently conducted a live bill run process on Gentrack technology for an independent systems integrator with a client who has over 20 million customers. The task was to bill at least their current performance of 250,000 bills in one hour. We set an internal KPI to deliver at least 600,000 bills/hour with at least 3 statement lines per bill.

We surpassed expectations, delivering 1.6 million bills in an hour and 8 minutes (therefore, approximate speed was around 1.41M bills per hour); over 5 times faster than their current system. 

This test underwent rigorous scrutiny and auditing, witnessed by third-party system integrator that monitored the full technical set up, process and results. 

Through meticulously crafted architecture, Gentrack continues to redefine efficiency. With our software, the billing cycle for the world’s largest utility companies can be completed within a day or two. 

In essence, scalability testing is not just a measure of our software’s robustness; it’s a testament to our unwavering commitment to innovation and excellence.