Farm electricity use against the peak windows: what to shift, and what to leave alone.

Most of regional NSW is on Essential Energy

Your distributor is set by your address, not your retailer, and for the great majority of farms in New South Wales that is Essential Energy. It covers regional New South Wales, which is nearly all of the state's farmland. Endeavour Energy picks up the Southern Highlands and parts of the Illawarra fringe, and Ausgrid covers the Hunter, so properties on those edges should check.

The windows on Essential Energy's business time of use tariffs are narrower than most people assume.

Last checked: 14 August 2026. Essential Energy business tariff codes and windows compiled by WATTever; demand windows from the same source's business demand periods table. Network tariffs typically change on 1 July, and your retailer can apply its own windows on top of the network's. The tariff code printed on your own bill is the only authority for your property.

On BLNT2AL, peak is three hours a day on weekdays. Fifteen hours out of the 168 in a week, or under a tenth of the time. That is a small target, and it means two things at once: the potential saving from dodging it is smaller than the energy-saving articles imply, and the cost of accidentally putting a big load inside it is proportionally sharper.

The tariff code matters more than the habits

Compare the first two rows of that table. BLNT2AU has a peak from 7am to 9am. BLNT2AL does not.

For a dairy, that is not a small difference. Morning milking, and the vat cooling and hot water wash that follow it, land in a fairly narrow band of the early morning that is dictated by the herd, not by the operator. If your tariff carries a 7am to 9am peak, a substantial part of your least moveable load is being billed at the highest rate available, every working day. No amount of behavioural advice fixes that, because you cannot ask the cows to come in at eleven.

This is the most valuable thing on this page: before you try to change what you do, check whether the window you are colliding with is the one you have to be on. Read the tariff code off the bill, look up its windows, and put them next to the times your fixed operations actually run. If they collide, that is a conversation with your retailer about a different tariff, and it is worth having before you spend a season rescheduling irrigation to save a fraction as much.

The same logic applies to the demand tariff, BLND1AB. A demand charge bills your single hardest half hour inside the window rather than your total consumption, so on a farm the question is not how much you use but whether several big things ever start at once between 5pm and 8pm on a weekday. Irrigation kicking in while the shed is running while the vat is pulling down is exactly that scenario.

Sorting the load into moveable and fixed

Work through the property once and put every significant load into one of three buckets. This is the exercise that makes the rest obvious.

Genuinely moveable

• Water pumping into storage. The best candidate on any property, because a tank absorbs the timing entirely and nobody is waiting on the water arriving at a particular minute. This is covered in detail by our sister site on pump running costs and off-peak pumping.
• Irrigation, within agronomic limits. Often shiftable by a few hours, which is all you need when the peak is three hours long. Evaporation losses usually argue for the same direction as the tariff does.
• Water heating. Dairy wash water and any other stored hot water is a battery in the same way a tank is.
• Battery and vehicle charging. Entirely schedulable.
• Grain aeration and drying. Long-running and generally tolerant of when it happens.

Fixed by the operation

• Milk vat cooling. Tied to milking. The load can be reduced with a pre-cooler or plate cooler, which is a capital question rather than a scheduling one, but it cannot be moved.
• Milking plant itself. Same reason.
• Anything with an animal waiting on it. Stock water pressure, ventilation in a shed, egg belts.
• Refrigeration holding a product at temperature. Runs when it needs to run.

Quietly wasteful, and worth finding first

• Pumps cycling because a float switch is worn or a line is leaking.
• Shed lighting, compressors and heaters left on outside working hours.
• Old refrigeration running far longer than it should because a seal or a fan has gone.
• A bore pump running dry, which costs the electricity and then costs the pump.

In practice this third bucket returns more than the first one on most properties we look at. Shifting a load saves the difference between two rates. Finding a load that should not be running at all saves the whole thing.

Building a load profile, which the new meter gives you free

The reason all of this used to be guesswork is that an old accumulation meter gave you one number a quarter. A smart meter records consumption in 30 minute intervals, which is the same resolution the demand charge is calculated on, and that data is yours.

Ask your retailer for your interval data, or read it through their portal, and line it up against what was running. What most properties find:

• A morning and evening shape that matches the fixed operations, which confirms which bucket those loads are in.
• A flat overnight baseline that is higher than expected. That baseline is refrigeration plus whatever was left on, and it runs 8,760 hours a year, so a small number there is a large annual figure.
• One or two spikes nobody can account for. Those are the ones worth chasing.

Interval data tells you when. It does not tell you what, because the meter sees the whole property as a single number. That is the gap monitoring fills: a sensor on the pump, the shed and the vat turns "something spiked at 5:30" into "the transfer pump ran for 40 minutes". One platform carrying all of it is the approach described on our page about one sensor platform, many uses, and the same gear that answers the energy question is already answering the run-dry and gate-open questions.

A sensible order to do this in

1. Find the tariff code on the bill and write down its windows.
2. List the fixed loads and their times. Milking, stock water, anything with an animal waiting.
3. Check for a collision. If a fixed load sits in the peak window, take that to your retailer before doing anything else.
4. Pull a month of interval data and find the overnight baseline and any unexplained spikes.
5. Move the easy ones. Pumping and water heating first, because they are the least disruptive and the most reliable.
6. Then measure again. A change you cannot see in the data is a change you cannot defend keeping.

If you want the tariff mechanics themselves rather than the farm application, our sister site sets out how time of use tariffs work, with the peak and off peak windows network by network.

Questions people ask