Open Electricity

Open Electricity is developed under The Superpower Institute’s Open Accessible Auditable Data (OAAD) Framework, which guides both the technical and user experience design. These principles shape a design process focused on legibility, responsiveness and trust.

Open: All data is freely available, promoting transparency and enabling collaboration.

Accessible: The interface is designed for clarity and ease-of-use, ensuring that complex information can be understood by users regardless of technical expertise.

Auditable: Every data point is traceable to its source, with rigorous documentation to ensure accuracy and reliability.  The project team are deeply embedded in Australia’s energy and climate ecosystem, and are regularly in conversation with analysts, researchers, journalists, policymakers and advocates, allowing user needs to be well understood from the outset. Features like the Tracker, Records Engine, Scenario Explorer and Facility Map have been iteratively developed in close collaboration with domain experts to ensure analytical integrity and real-world usefulness.

The platform is in a continuous state of development, with new features shaped by direct user feedback and real-world use. The design team pay particular attention to accessibility, mobile usability and visual hierarchy, allowing users of varying expertise to navigate the system with ease.

The result is a live, trusted and widely cited public platform that exceeds the original brief – transforming inaccessible market data into a clear and engaging public resource. It demonstrates how thoughtful design, embedded in real world networks, can help reshape public understanding and improve decision making in a critical national transition.

Open Electricity exemplifies the core principles of good digital design: functionality, accessibility, clarity and quality. It transforms highly technical electricity market data into a clean, engaging and easy to use platform that serves experts and non-experts alike. Every design decision has been made with the user in mind.

The platform’s interface is intuitive and visually coherent, with accessibility embedded at every level. Design decisions are driven by the goal of lowering the barrier to entry for users unfamiliar with the electricity system. The tone is neutral and informative, allowing the data to speak for itself. Data integrity is ensured through rigorous sourcing, transparent processing and full traceability of every data point.

The user experience is central to the platform’s purpose. Core features like the Tracker, Records Engine and Scenario Explorer are designed to invite exploration, support learning and reward curiosity. As a public product, it is also sustainable by design: lightweight, open source and built for continual evolution based on user feedback.

Open Electricity sets a new benchmark for how digital tools can serve the public good. It communicates the power of investing in professional design - not just to solve commercial problems, but to improve civic literacy, policy dialogue and environmental outcomes. It raises the standard for public data platforms in Australia, offering a model that could be applied internationally across other complex systems.

Open Electricity was the model for The Superpower Institutes other OAAD project, Open Methane – an open platform for measuring Australias methane emissions using satellite observations.  By reimagining energy data as a public interface, Open Electricity shows what’s possible when high quality design is embedded in critical infrastructure - and why that matters for a more informed, democratic and sustainable future.

Open Electricity reimagines how electricity system data can be accessed, understood and used by the public. It solves a longstanding challenge: energy market data in Australia is technically complex, scattered across multiple sources, and difficult for non-specialists to interpret.

Open Electricity addresses this by creating a unified, open and user-friendly platform that transforms raw data into clear, live insights- empowering users to understand and engage with the energy transition as it happens. The design is user centred from the ground up.

The project team is embedded in the energy sector and in constant dialogue with analysts, journalists, policymakers and advocates – resulting in a platform built around real-world needs.  Several features represent genuine digital innovation.

• The Records Engine automatically detects and publishes major electricity system milestones in real time – a task that previously largely relied on expert analysis.
• The Scenario Explorer brings Australia’s long term electricity system planning to life, making AEMO’s Integrated System Plan accessible for the first time to non-experts.
• The Facility Map and database offers a comprehensive, searchable index of every generator in the country, including real time and historical data.

All features are underpinned by an open API, enabling others to build on the platform. Importantly, the platform is built on the Open, Accessible, Auditable Data (OAAD) framework – a design philosophy that prioritises trust, usability and transparency.

The result is a platform that not only fills a critical gap in Australia’s energy data infrastructure, but sets a new benchmark for open source, public-interest digital design – offering a model that could be applied to other climate and infrastructure challenges globally.

Open Electricity delivers lasting social, environmental and civic impact through the power of open data and thoughtful design. By transforming complex electricity market data into an accessible public resource, it helps Australians understand the changing energy system - empowering smarter decisions, better journalism, more informed policy and richer public conversation. It strengthens trust in the energy transition and improves democratic engagement in one of the most important transformations of our time.

The platform’s environmental impact lies in its role as an enabler. By highlighting trends like rising renewable generation, record battery output or declining coal, Open Electricity accelerates understanding of Australia’s transition to a clean electricity system. It supports policy, investment and advocacy that drive decarbonisation.

Commercially, Open Electricity delivers value by strengthening the reputation of The Superpower Institute and enabling third-party innovation through its open API. Consultants, researchers and educators are  building on the platform. It is a public good - one that supports private sector insight, academic rigour and industry transparency.

Developed by a Melbourne-based team, Open Electricity showcases how professional digital design can serve national infrastructure, civic education and global climate goals, without compromising on usability or quality. It exemplifies what’s possible when creative, technical and strategic disciplines come together to solve complex, high impact challenges.