The NEAR Program

The NEAR Program

Australia's National Energy Analytics Research Program

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What is the NEAR Program?

The NEAR Program website is a platform for discovering data, research and reports from across the energy sector. Our focus is on providing you with a single access point to the best resources for understanding what drives and shapes Australian energy consumption behaviour, from individual households and businesses to our national energy use trends. The team behind the NEAR Program curates public data assets, works with data holders to release previously private data, deploys powerful data science techniques to expand the value of existing data, and leads brand new data collection and research efforts to fill critical gaps for the energy sector.

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    Highlights

    • Interactive data visualisations

      Interactive data visualisationsTired of staring at an endless stream of numbers in massive CSV files? This collection of interactive data tools provides a fresh perspective on NEAR Program findings and public data assets. The tools enable the exploration of building comfort and cooling drivers and trade-offs, householder energy use, and regional electricity and gas use. Plus, you have access to all of the underlying data, should you really feel the need to open up Excel one more time.
    • Making PV gross again

      Making PV gross againThere is no shortage of net solar PV generation data out there, but if you want to really understand how PV systems are performing and want to tease out load from generation, you need to get gross. This collection of assets highlight approaches to estimating gross PV output at individual premises and provides, for the first time, preliminary outputs describing years of time-series gross PV estimates for zone substations across Australia.
    • Zone substation electricity demand across Australia

      Zone substation electricity demand across AustraliaThe NEAR Program team has brought together up to a decade of half-hourly electricity consumption data for thousands of zone substations across Australia’s electricity distribution systems and linked each with spatial information. The zone substation dataset is a rich view into the longitudinal load consumption behaviour of Australian electricity users. The data is presented in a consistent format across distribution businesses, available for free in NEAR and includes interactive geospatial visualisations of demand over time on the AREMI platform.
    • Just who is the modern Australian energy consumer?

      Just who is the modern Australian energy consumer?To explore the complex connections between household energy use, demographics, building characteristics and appliance uptake, the NEAR team recently designed and delivered a series of pilot residential energy surveys in Victoria and Western Australia. The surveying program has given rise to a collection of data and reports that provide insight into effective survey design in this space, methods for maximising surveying uptake, and the nature and characteristics of household energy use seen in participating households.
    • Heating and cooling electrical demand across Australia over the last decade

      Heating and cooling electrical demand across Australia over the last decadeDrawing on data science techniques that link weather data, zone substation electricity consumption, Bayesian inference technologies and thermostatically controlled load simulation together, the NEAR Program team has developed half-hourly estimates of cooling- and heating-related electricity consumption for more than a thousand zone substations across Australia. This release provides preliminary data for up to a decade of electricity consumption associated with thermostatically controlled load devices, together with methodological reporting.
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