Australia’s energy market is highly competitive, with more than a hundred electricity retailers vying for customers in an open marketplace. Offering a fixed price to customers comes with a significant risk for energy suppliers, as wholesale electricity costs in Australia change constantly due to the market’s volatility. Managing this risk is crucial for energy retailers, who often rely on data-rich quoting software to help them monitor fluctuating electricity prices. However, such solutions are costly and typically only feasible for larger businesses and energy users.
To address this issue, Beige Technologies has developed innovative solutions that help energy providers of all sizes manage their risk by tracking the correlation between customer usage and wholesale prices. By using rich data to create user-friendly charts, their team helps energy retailers better understand market trends and adjust their pricing strategies accordingly. This approach provides greater transparency and control to energy providers, allowing them to offer competitive prices to their customers, while still effectively managing their risk. Beige Technologies is helping to improve the efficiency and competitiveness of Australia’s energy market, benefitting both energy providers and customers alike.
“We think of Observable as a very fancy, expressive napkin drawing, which serves the purpose of simply and effectively communicating design ideas to our developers. It helps quickly bring high fidelity designs closer to reality, similar to how Figma has done for designers,” said Jesse Warburg, co-founder at Beige Technologies.
Building in multiple tools is inefficient
In the past, the team at Beige Technologies faced challenges in their project development process. They would start by creating prototypes of projects in Microsoft Excel, but then had to hand them off to developers to create final data apps or dashboards using different tools. This process was time-consuming and posed a significant risk of technical debt, especially when dealing with over half a million data points. Building complex interactive features was a daunting task for developers, which often resulted in project planning and execution challenges.
The power of the improved handoff
Observable provides a much better solution, by allowing the Beige Technologies team to quickly build in Javascript, a language they are already familiar with. This streamlined handoff process has enabled them to close the loop between design and development, saving significant time and effort.
The team has been particularly excited about the power of Observable to create compelling and reusable data dashboards such as their platform “Moose.” Moose generates prices while explaining and exploring the specific drivers of those prices, such as why the energy price is high or low throughout the day or night. This helps drive customer conversion and engagement in the sales cycle.
With a tool like Moose, energy providers can also better understand and monitor customer usage at specific times of day - including peak usage where energy is most expensive to deliver. This helps energy providers more effectively spot trends and adjust their pricing based on a more granular understanding of their multitude of data points.
Beige Technologies’ Moose energy monitoring and quote platform
Additionally, they created this Waffle Iron that showcases the power generation from Australia’s largest interconnected electrical grid. This grid stretches from northern Queensland to the southern island state of Tasmania, and Observable allows them to provide a simple yet powerful visualization of this complex system’s power output year over year.
Energy is big business and has vast implications to everyone on the planet. By more effectively monitoring and adjusting pricing according to data driven insights, teams like Beige Technologies provide value to energy sellers and customers alike.
