Reposit Power: Unleashing a future without electricity bills for Australian households with Google Cloud big-data tools
About Reposit Power
Reposit Power is an Australian distributed-energy company on a mission to make energy limitless and free for all. It installs solar battery systems across Australia and integrates them with smart software to offer five years of "No Bill" electricity that is clean and unlimited. The proprietary software acts as a gateway that balances supply and demand in the wholesale electricity market and on the distribution network. Reposit Power is a recipient of the Sir William Hudson Award, the highest honor granted to a project in the Australian Engineering Excellence Awards.
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About Katana1
Katana1 is a Sydney-based data analytics partner that specializes in deploying Google Cloud solutions to build data pipelines and scalable high-performance cloud systems on Google Kubernetes Engine and Compute Engine architecture.
Reposit Power has used Google Cloud to guarantee their customers get $0 electricity bills, increased their solar devices under control tenfold with one-third the DevOps team, and forged an AI-based global expansion strategy.
Google Cloud results
- Boosts energy service reliability by cutting incident alerts from one per day to one in weeks
- Frees up time and funds for creative tasks by enabling threefold reduction in DevOps
- Enhances customer satisfaction and loyalty by carrying out 18-month migration to Google Cloud with zero service interruptions
- Secured IP and customer personal data with built-in encryption and security protocols
10x increase in solar batteries traded
When Dean Spaccavento was growing up under the hot Australian sun, his electrical engineer father filled him with wonder at the way energy sources turn to heat. It led to a lifelong fascination with harnessing renewable sources such as the sun, which grew deeper as climate change threatened the future of the planet.
Spaccavento went on to a career in finance, specializing in commodity derivatives trading. Until one day, a thought came upon him. What if he could create a power company that supplies Australian homes with cheap and stable clean energy, by harvesting the sun's unlimited power and trading it on energy markets using big data analytics?
"We have free energy coming from the sky. Our software optimizes allocation of this energy in space and time, and for it to work, we need the best cloud data tools. We considered all major providers, and the big data solutions of Google Cloud were leaps and bounds ahead of the others due to their seamless auto-scaling."
—Dean Spaccavento, CEO, Reposit PowerThe inspiration led Spaccavento to found Reposit Power (Reposit). The startup fits Australian homes with solar panels and batteries, so they can be free of electricity bills for five years. In return, Reposit takes electricity from each of these micro power units to trade for a profit. It's a form of energy arbitrage in which algorithmic modeling enables Reposit to take excess solar energy and move it where it's most in demand. This business model achieves two long elusive goals in solar power: stable supply and profitability.
For it to work, Reposit needed a big data analytics platform that could process more than a million energy data points per hour. Reposit started life on physical servers, but soon found that was not viable as it grew, leading it to look for a cloud solution. By choosing Google Cloud, Reposit gained petabyte-scale data pipelines that allow zero-cost electricity to Australian homes.
"We have free energy coming from the sky. Our software optimizes allocation of this energy in space and time, and for it to work, we need the best cloud data tools," says Spaccavento. "We considered all major providers, and the big data solutions of Google Cloud were leaps and bounds ahead of the others due to their seamless auto-scaling."
"We were choking on the millions of data points coming in from customers per hour, and suddenly Bigtable streamlines everything. The impact was amazing. Thousands of households were happier, our partner utilities were happier, our support team was happier, because everything is reliable and fast."
—Dean Spaccavento, CEO, Reposit PowerEnabling an energy startup's growth with advanced cloud tools and partnership commitment
When Reposit launched in 2012, the goal of freeing Australian homes from electricity bills was a distant dream. Hosted on rented servers at a Sydney data center, the platform could only offer affordable solar energy to a limited audience. A lean team of 10 engineers juggled creative software development with mundane tasks such as infrastructure maintenance and configuration.
Reposit's growing popularity soon became one of its headaches. It needed to keep ordering more servers to meet demand, and the data center often took more than a week to install them. Meanwhile, the servers were prone to outages under any traffic spike from thousands of Reposit devices across Australia. The startup soon reached a tipping point where it felt it could no longer grow while meeting service level commitments, leading to its hunt for a cloud provider.
Beyond superior data tools, Google Cloud came out on top thanks to a proactive approach to upskilling Reposit's team with cutting-edge cloud methodologies. "Google Cloud were the only ones who were interested in working with us on the right architecture, not just selling us a solution," says Mike Leonard, CTO of Reposit Power. "They were eager to train us to the point where we're super confident working inside Google Cloud, scaling up, scaling down, trying new services, creating new features."
The Google team also introduced Reposit to Katana1, which masterminded an 18-month migration that moved all Reposit's virtual machines and time-series databases to a Google Cloud architecture, built on Compute Engine, with zero downtime to energy and customer facing services.
"With Google Cloud, we've gone from worrying about compute power to 'how fast can we sell?' The technology ceased to be a constraint on the scaling of our virtual power plants. And that gave us confidence to launch our No Bill solution."
—Dean Spaccavento, CEO, Reposit PowerLaunching a "No Bill" energy solution with the power of Cloud Bigtable and Dataflow
Reposit's first of its kind "No Bill '' energy package guarantees customers all the electricity they need without seeing a bill for five years. It's an achievement that makes life better for thousands of Australian households, while contributing to climate change mitigation with a mass-market solar energy service. Spaccavento says a combination of Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Functions, and Dataflow enables Reposit's software to churn out the granular modelling predictions that make No Bill possible.
Central to the capability upgrade has been Cloud Bigtable, which stores Reposit's massive time-series databases. These databases are home to all time-stamped data, from weather patterns to energy usage, from day one of Reposit's history. Cloud Bigtable reads millions of data points per second and keeps the data hot, or instantly accessible, for querying by Cloud Functions in complex algorithmic trading calculations.
Reposit also uses Compute Engine and Dataflow to build auto-scaling data pipelines for real-time device telemetry and time series data in Cloud Bigtable. Built-in encryption keeps millions of personal data points secure both at rest and in transit.
Spaccavento says the switch to Cloud Bigtable, Compute Engine, and Dataflow from legacy, bare-metal data-processing services yielded game-changing results. "We were choking on the millions of data points coming in from customers per hour, and suddenly Bigtable streamlines everything," he says. "The impact was amazing. Thousands of households were happier, our partner utilities were happier, our support team was happier, because everything is reliable and fast."
Overall, the migration to Google Cloud has yielded significant measurable results. The company now operates 10 times more solar energy devices, with a third of its previous DevOps staff and zero downtime. On bare-metal infrastructure, Reposit received at least one incident alert per day, be it a maxed-out hard drive or connectivity glitch. Now on Google Cloud, weeks pass without Reposit receiving a single alert.
The biggest result of all? The confidence to expand without limits and launch an audacious plan to make household electricity bills a thing of the past. "With Google Cloud, we've gone from worrying about compute power to 'how fast can we sell?' The technology ceased to be a constraint on the scaling of our virtual power plants. And that gave us confidence to launch our No Bill solution."
Securely developing energy's future on Chromebook and Google Workspace
The energy sector is one of the most security-intensive industries that exist. Reposit handles millions of sensitive personal data points from customers every day. It exchanges confidential information with external partners such as utilities. And it needs to protect its IP as developers collaborate on groundbreaking solutions from home.
For Reposit, adopting Chromebooks and Google Workspace as its main work environment has brought a crucial security advantage beyond productivity and collaborative boosts. With Google security protocols hard-wired into the systems, Reposit can code, collaborate, and share files with peace of mind without having to bother with expensive third-party security solutions.
Chromebooks are a powerful, affordable, and secure solution for Reposit because they are built exclusively for work in the Chrome Browser. That means they require few separate hardware and software installations, which can be costly and insecure. With Chromebooks, all work takes place and is stored securely on Google's cloud, with unlimited scale, using Google Workspace tools.
"Since all of our work in Google Workspace and Chromebooks happens in the Chrome Browser, the environment is inherently secure, thanks to built-in Google security and reduced surface area for potential breaches," says Spaccavento. "We only need Google Authenticator for identity-and-access management. Everything else is taken care of, which frees us from lots of interoperating security vendors and VPNs."
Spreading free energy around the world with Google machine learning solutions
Reposit is now forging strategies to take its no electricity bill proposition beyond Australia, to bigger markets such as California and India. Spaccavento says these are vastly more complicated markets than Australia, from logistical, regulatory, and cost perspectives.
"In Australia, we know the market inside out. Abroad, we don't have home game advantage. Machine learning solutions like BigQuery ML and AutoML will enable us to find correlations and relationships between energy system, behavior, and price, without needing years of experience. With these advanced Google tools, the sky's the limit for the good we can achieve."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Reposit Power
Reposit Power is an Australian distributed-energy company on a mission to make energy limitless and free for all. It installs solar battery systems across Australia and integrates them with smart software to offer five years of "No Bill" electricity that is clean and unlimited. The proprietary software acts as a gateway that balances supply and demand in the wholesale electricity market and on the distribution network. Reposit Power is a recipient of the Sir William Hudson Award, the highest honor granted to a project in the Australian Engineering Excellence Awards.
About Katana1
Katana1 is a Sydney-based data analytics partner that specializes in deploying Google Cloud solutions to build data pipelines and scalable high-performance cloud systems on Google Kubernetes Engine and Compute Engine architecture.