The people
Team
Headquartered in South Australia, powered by a distributed national team of energy industry professionals.
Simon Hackett — Founder
Simon’s path to Energy Autopilot runs through three decades of building things ahead of their time — and each chapter turns out to be a rehearsal for this one.
The internet chapter. Fresh out of the University of Adelaide, Simon was part of the team that created AARNet — the first emergence of the internet in Australia — and, in 1990, co-created the world’s first Internet Toaster, arguably the first-ever IoT device. In 1991 he founded Internode, growing it into one of Australia’s largest privately held broadband companies — hundreds of staff, a quarter-million services, and a reputation built on network quality and customer service — before selling it to iiNet in 2011. Along the way: a seat on the NBN Co board and the Charles Todd Medal for contributions to Australian telecommunications.
The electric vehicle chapter. Simon became Australia’s foremost early EV adopter the hard way: in 2009 he privately imported the country’s first Tesla Roadster, then drove it from Darwin to Adelaide to prove a production EV could cross the continent — including 501 km through the desert on a single charge, a world distance record for production electric cars at the time. His family took delivery of the first two right-hand-drive Tesla Model S cars in Australia.
The battery chapter. Then came more than a decade of immersion in battery technology as an investor and innovator — including designing battery management systems through his involvement with flow-battery maker Redflow, and building a substantial renewable energy deployment at The Vale, in Tasmania. He’s also an investor in the Fully Charged Show and its worldwide Everything Electric events.
This chapter. Energy Autopilot is where the three threads meet — and a move up the stack. Internode taught him how to run distributed infrastructure: intelligent central coordination working with capable local equipment, which is exactly the FMS-and-Servo architecture. The EV and battery years taught him the physical layer of home energy, hands-on. Now he’s architecting the layer above: turning homes and offices into efficient, self-managing power plants.
More about Simon at simonhackett.com.