The situation
Sugar mills that co-generate electricity can sell surplus power back into the grid through the AEMO wholesale market. Whether that’s worth doing at any given moment depends on the spot price, which changes every five minutes.
Mackay Sugar was monitoring those prices manually. Someone checking an external website, making a call, and then acting on it. In a market that moves every five minutes, that process introduces delays that cost money. The team knew what they needed to do; the problem was getting the data into the control system automatically.
What we built
The solution has three components working together.
Data retrieval: A custom web service polls the AEMO API on a regular interval, retrieves current and forecast pricing data, and makes it available in a structured format.
PLC translation: A Red Lion Edge device picks up that data and converts it into register values the PLC can read directly. Red Lion’s Crimson software handles the protocol translation. The PLC doesn’t need to know it’s talking to an API; it just reads values from registers like any other input.
SCADA display: A dedicated SCADA screen shows operators the current AEMO price, forecast pricing across the next dispatch intervals, and relevant thresholds, in the same environment they’re already using to run the mill.
Outcome
The manual monitoring process is gone. AEMO pricing data appears in the control system automatically, updated every dispatch interval. Operators have what they need to make export decisions without leaving the SCADA environment.
For a mill that co-generates a meaningful amount of electricity, being able to respond to price movements quickly, rather than minutes later after a manual check, has a real impact on the economics of the operation.
This kind of integration sits at the intersection of IT and OT: it requires pulling data from an external API, moving it through an edge device, and presenting it in an industrial control system. It’s increasingly common as industrial operators look to optimise around energy markets, and the architecture scales to other data sources beyond AEMO.