Latest Energy Exploration and AI

My latest energy data exploration has been a little more local than the national grid: my parents’ solar installation.

In March 2025, a new GivEnergy solar system with battery storage was installed. Given the GivEnergy app provided decent information at the time, I didn’t do much more than poke around their APIs. I had vaguely considered building something to bring multiple systems together, but it wasn’t a priority.

Since then, GivEnergy went into administration and ceased trading, which removed free access to the app’s historic data and left it showing only live status.

Normally, this is the sort of thing that would sit on a to-do list indefinitely. Pulling telemetry from APIs, storing the history properly, and putting a decent front end on it isn’t particularly difficult — it just takes time I generally want to spend on other things. Without AI, it would still be sitting on that list, maybe getting sorted eventually, maybe never.

I’m still not entirely sold on the wider spread of AI, especially in the creative arts, where I’m not sure it can ever overcome the ethical concerns, and I wouldn’t rely on it to build something I didn’t already understand. The amount of pure “vibe coding” out there is pretty worrying. The difference here is that this is all stuff I could have written myself given a free weekend. Whether that makes it an acceptable middle ground, I don’t really know, but it’s where I land.

Rather than just replicating the basic app, I’ve actually built two separate energy apps:

• System & Battery Monitoring: Alongside live power flow (solar, battery, grid, and home load) and historical trends, it goes quite a bit deeper into the hardware side than the standard app did. It tracks inverter temperatures, cycle counts, individual cell voltage balancing across all 16 battery cells, and grid voltage and frequency (something I added when their street was temporarily running off a diesel generator for around 20 houses rather than the main grid).

  

• Smart Meter & Cost Tracking: To see the financial side of things, I hooked into the Glowmarkt API (api.glowmarkt.com) to pull SMETS2 smart meter data. That lets us track daily, weekly, or monthly costs, factoring in electricity import, standing charges, and gas usage, and offsetting it all against solar export payments to see the actual net bill and work out the real financial benefit of the combined solar and battery setup.

  

These are tools I fully intend to build upon. Maybe not specifically for my parents’ setup, as it already does what they need, but I plan on getting a solar system myself in the not-too-distant future, and having a custom-built starting point will be useful when I do — potentially as part of other comprehensive tracker apps I have planned.

Having built this with AI, I do still have reservations about making it fully public. However, if anyone thinks this would be useful for their own setup, get in touch and I’ll happily share the code.