Where to get your meter data

Verified 26 July 2026

Your smart meter records your home every 30 minutes. That record is yours, and you can ask for it. The file you want is called a NEM12 file. It is a plain CSV, and it is the only thing that prices a time-of-use or VPP plan honestly for a battery home.

There are two places it can come from: your retailer, the company that bills you, or your network, the company that owns the poles, wires and the meter itself. Either one has to give it to you. They differ a lot in how quickly.

Start with the fast path

In Victoria and South Australia, your network runs a self-service portal. You register once with your meter number and download the file yourself, in minutes, any time you like. That is almost always faster than asking your retailer, who has up to 10 business days to answer.

In New South Wales and Queensland there is no self-service portal. Both the network and the retailer work off a request form, and both take up to 10 business days. Pick whichever form you find easier.

All the network portals and forms, state by state

Guides by retailer

• AGL
• Origin Energy
• EnergyAustralia
• Red Energy and Lumo Energy

We started with these because between them they bill most Australian households, and because the four paths are genuinely different from each other. If your retailer is not here, the network route works no matter who bills you, and the generic guide covers what to ask any retailer for.

Before you start

• Have a bill in front of you. Every portal and every form asks for your meter number (NMI). It is on your bill, usually near the address.
• Ask for 12 months. A full year covers every season. Less than that and summer or winter is missing, which is exactly when a battery earns or loses money.
• Ask for the detailed or interval file, not the summary. The summary is a PDF of totals. It cannot be used for anything.
• Do not open it in Excel and re-save it. Excel rewrites the file and breaks it. Here is why, and what to do instead.

What we do with it

You upload the file to your report and we price the plans a bill alone cannot price, then check your verdict against your real half-hours. We keep the half-hourly numbers with your report and delete the file itself the moment we have read it. See how it works and our privacy policy.

Every guide here carries the date we last checked it. Portals get redesigned and forms move. If a step is wrong, tell us at support@powerlens.com.au and we will fix the page.