Telstra lands $100m smart meter deal to drive renewable transition

Smart meters were initially seen as useful with billing, by removing the need to have workers going around to dwellings checking the numbers on each meter, but Mr Ballantine said the devices were increasingly appealing to consumers who wanted to use a power mix, including from renewable sources, to track their usage and make money from feeding power back into the grid.

“We are seeing an explosion of optionality with these meters in terms of both the importance of managing solar on the roof, and the interaction of solar and other renewable capabilities with the electricity network itself,” Mr Ballantine said.

“Our devices enable a two-way communication between the network and the home, to both facilitate the most efficient use of renewables in the home, but then also to provide the connectivity to enable trading on the grid itself.”

Telstra has made a number of investments, aside from developing its IoT network, in recent times. Last week its Telstra Purple services arm acquired two companies in the IoT space; Brisbane-based Alliance Automation which offers industrial automation solutions, and Aqura Technologies which helps business, such as mining companies, deploy and manage on-site networks.

Aside from the commercial deals, the vast number of organisations connecting devices to Telstra’s IoT networks is creating a huge amount of new data that it can mine for insights, something which helped inspire a new joint venture with home-grown data and analytics group Quantium late last year.

The telco says it has the largest IoT network in Australia, with around four million square kilometres of narrowband coverage and around three million square kilometres of LTE-M coverage (a mobile network specifically designed for the IoT).

Telstra’s head of enterprise, David Burns, said there were now five million devices connected to its IoT network, and that it was adding roughly 2000 new devices to it every day. He said Intellihub represented an important deal in the energy sector, but that the IoT opportunity was much broader.

“You can take the word energy and replace it with livestock or retail, or transportation and logistics,” he said.

“There is collection and management and better decision-making from data across the Australian marketplace, in many instances where that is more and more remote.”

Intellihub is owned by two private equity firms after Canadian firm Brookfield Asset Management paid about $1 billion for a 50 per cent stake at the end of last year. The other half of the company is owned by Pacific Equity Partners.

“We are delighted that such a high quality, internationally recognised fund manager saw our business as such a strategic and integral part of the energy construct of the future,” Mr Ballantine said.

“Between that and a $1.5 billion debt facility or ‘green loan’ that we secured last year, we are very well capitalised and well positioned to, not only deliver the core metering capabilities, but we have strong aims regarding broader innovation and supporting our customers on that path to the renewable sector.”