Electric Energy T&D - Index

Electric Energy T&D - EEMag May June 2008 - Index

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Bills in multiple languages so that all
customers can be included in conservation
and efficiency programs.
Incentives and rebates. Utilities have
long been involved in regulator-mandated
rebate programs for, for instance, energyefficient
air conditioners or compact
fluorescent light bulbs. Increasingly,
however, regulators are requiring utilities
to withhold payment until customers
demonstrate an actual reduction in
consumption. In these cases, the CIS
must be able to analyze bills before and
after the installation of the equipment
subject to the rebate and release payment
only to consumers who meet the minimum
expectation of reduced electricity use.
It is particularly important that the CIS
offer the option to include incentives either
as a subtraction from the monthly bill or
as a separate payment. There is currently
no “best practice” as to whether such
payments should be included on the bill
or delivered separately. Utilities report
varying responses to varying plans. Some
see greater participation when they include
the incentive on the bill. Others get better
results by highlighting the conservation
effort through a separate payment. As you
gain experience with different programs and
different customers, you will want to try out
alternatives and compare results. Your CIS
should not restrict your options.
• Customer analysis that accommodates
demographic inputs from non-utility
sources. While utilities almost invariably
make incentives available to all customers
in a class, there is far more pay-off in
marketing incentives heavily to those
most likely to use them. An apartment
dweller using electricity only for lighting,
home entertainment, and a few landlordprovided
appliances is unlikely to respond
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to home insulation incentives. In contrast,
utilities will obviously get better results
when they market pool heating incentives
to those whose county property records
indicate that they have pools.
Web portals. A CIS that populates
individual customer Web portals
helps customers identify use trends.
Portals can then provide tools that let
customers explore “what if” scenarios
that demonstrate the effects of various
conservation and efficiency strategies on
their bills and their carbon footprint.
Interval Billing
The checklist above represents an array of
relatively small changes likely to be required
as regulators, utilities, and customers move
forward with programs to reduce greenhouse
gas emissions. Far more dramatic is
the requirement now being addressed
in California, Ontario, and elsewhere to
implement interval metering and pricing
for all customers including residential
consumers.
Few if any utilities can accommodate universal
interval billing with IT systems currently in
place. Many lack even the software to handle
interval or “complex billing”—a name that
only hints at the depth and sophistication of
its underlying software algorithms. And those
with complex billing software in place—now
typically used for large industrial customers—
will likely find themselves overwhelmed by
the onslaught of terabytes of new data that
arrive when hourly meter reads replace twelve
annual customer data points with more than
8,000. Most will want to offload the data into
a Meter Data Management system that can
make data available to many departments for
use in outage restoration, dispatch, supply
portfolio refinement, and other business
processes.
Despite the challenges posed by the need to
handle massive amounts of additional data,
interval billing greatly enlarges the scope of
conservation options by enabling programs
like:
• Demand response, which encourages
conservation and appliance time shifting
by increasing electricity’s price during
peak periods. A variation of demand
response is critical peak pricing, which
raises the price only occasionally, during
periods of exceptionally high demand.
May-June 2008 Issue I
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Help with high bills. Graphs of interval
bills readily reveal patterns of use. By
training customer service representatives
in the likely causes of and remedies for
high usage during different times of the
day or days in the week, utilities can
help customers identify sub-optimal
electricity use and adopt conservation
alternatives. Utilities can make similar
services available through individualized
Web portals.
Anomaly detection. Utilities that actively
monitor hourly reads can readily expose
and halt attempts at theft. They can also
detect unusual consumption patterns
that, for a household, might indicate a
refrigerator inadvertently left running in
a garage or a break-in at a supposedly
vacant vacation home or rental property.
The Strategic CIS
Billing has always been a mission-critical
operation for utilities. Today, it is rapidly
becoming a strategic instrument that helps
utilities and their customers address emerging
environmental imperatives. j
About the Author
Guerry Waters joined the Oracle Utilities
Global Business Unit (previously SPL
WorldGroup) in 2000. Previous positions
include Vice President of Energy Information
Strategy at META Group (now Gartner) and
CTO and Director of Technology Strategy and
Engineering at Southern Company. He focuses
on IT strategies that help utilities meet their
goals amidst changing customer demands,
regulations, and market structures.
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