Evergen Powers the Global Transition to Renewable Energy with Software Platform on AWS

By 2050, it is estimated that 90 percent of the world’s electricity will come from renewable energy sources like sunlight, water, and wind. Australia-based Evergen wants to help power and energy vendors and consumers meet that goal by optimising energy supply chains. “We exist to accelerate the world’s transition to renewable energy,” says Nick McGrath, chief technology officer at Evergen, “and we do that by designing software to aid in that transition.” 

Evergen’s primary software platform is the Distributed Energy Resource Management System (DERMS), which supports the management and optimisation of distributed energy resources  such as rooftop solar panels and commercial batteries. DERMS provides configurable dashboards that give customers a single-pane-of-glass view of energy resources. “With a centralised view, customers can easily see how they’re tracking against expectations, so they can optimise deployed resources to reduce costs for retailers and ultimately end customers,” McGrath explains.

Several of Evergen’s applications receive telemetry data from sensors attached to batteries, and the company found it needed a better way to scale as business grew. “Because of the way our platform was architected, our only option was to scale vertically to address growing volumes of telemetry data. Initially, we tried to allocate additional resources to our IT environment, but we soon realised that was an inefficient approach,” says McGrath. 

In addition, Evergen sought to decrease operational costs. The company was paying around A$30 per site every month to run virtual machines—for thousands of customer sites. Evergen also needed to speed up the DERMS platform. “In Australia, energy prices change every five minutes, so if we optimised sites based on a five-minute period in a linear fashion, we could entirely miss a price period and optimise for the wrong price,” McGrath explains.

To save on costs and increase performance, Evergen decided to rearchitect its platform from the ground up and move its environment, including the DERMS platform, to Amazon Web Services (AWS). “Our engineers were familiar with AWS, and we appreciated that AWS supported our new architecture and infrastructure-as-code approach,” says McGrath.

The DERMS environment now runs on Amazon EKS.  The platform compiles telemetry data from thousands of houses, buildings, and generation assets locally and globally—including data on solar panels, batteries, and electricity meters, as well as weather and pricing data—and stores it in Amazon S3. Evergen uses Amazon Athena, an interactive query service, to analyse the telemetry data directly from Amazon S3. 

By leveraging Amazon S3 and Amazon Athena, Evergen can easily gauge battery performance and visualise how much total energy is used at a customer site. It can also accurately forecast how much electricity the site’s solar panels will produce and how much energy will be consumed at the site over the next 48 hours.

“We use weather, pricing, and energy usage data to predict solar energy production and energy needs to optimise battery deployment. This helps us generate an optimal plan for either serving a site's energy needs, storing the energy from solar panels for later use, or selling it back to the grid.” McGrath says.