Challenge: Reducing Costs
Challenge:
reducing and managing costs
across a wide range of energy management operations and activities
Symptoms include:
- Revenue stagnation, difficulty increasing rates due to regulatory commission limitations
- Difficulty financing infrastructure improvements. Financial restrictions imposed by regulatory commissions limit your ability to recoup investment costs
- Need to reduce costs, including system integration, administration, consulting, licensing, support and maintenance of proprietary systems, and regulatory penalties
- Deployment of on-premise solutions is expensive and time-consuming; often there are few personnel with the time to manage yet another solution – especially one requiring regular manual interaction
- ROI is difficult to quantify for demand response
- Inability to verify settlement performance following DR events
Recommended Solutions:
- Open up new revenue opportunities by offering new rate and pricing programs, demand response, third party advertising, and business services enabled through automated systems
- Hire a team of strategic advisors with expertise in energy data management to help you plan these programs, identify early wins, and prioritize your needs
- Enable customers to purchase equipment directly – and take ownership in reducing their energy usage, permanently. Often, the cost of on-premise equipment is the first – and largest – cost that utilities and/or their customers have to swallow. It can be difficult to convince customers to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on energy-saving products – even with a proven return on investment. To succeed, you must minimize up-front costs. Specific suggestions:
- Utilize grant money and project funding to help defray up-front costs
- Look for solutions with flexible payment models
- Find a financing partner who will take on the burden of up-front costs
- For the Power Provider, software-as-a service is an excellent way to deploy solutions quickly, while avoiding the costs of on-premise deployment, staff hiring and training, and administration
- Look for flexibility. Don’t buy solutions that have proprietary devices, and lock you into limited options. Few, if any solutions have all of the pieces you need for a complete solution; proprietary systems can require hidden license fees
- Look for solutions with multiple configuration and device options that allow you to buy only what you need, and either integrate with other systems or add components late
- Research a provider’s integration experience. In the absence of well-established industry standards, look for providers who have a track record of integrating with solutions on each level of the energy ecosystem – meters, control devices, in-home displays and customer interfaces, back-end systems, and third party applications
- Look for solutions with a proven ROI. If a provider can’t point to examples of the level of energy reduction it has achieved (in either small scale or permanent deployments), they might not have a solution that is market ready. Expect that your customer’s level of reduction will vary dramatically based on how you engage with them, their existing systems, and how well you incent them to participate
What we offer:
- Our solution provides a bridge between the utility and the customer – enabling power providers to offer a broad suite of rates, pricing, and DR programs – as well as promotion of related in-house and third party services
- We offer highly flexible payment structures, including transaction-based models and monthly leasing. We help you to keep initial costs low evaluate customer response at a much lower risk. more about our financing options
- We offer turn-key financing options, and have the ability to bill customers directly for on-premise equipment and monthly license fees. This helps ensure ownership and participation by customers, without the need for utility commission rate increase nightmares
- We offer a modular, cost-effective SAAS solution. We have solutions that have been in place for years, which have been proven to reduce the costs of manual systems by up to 97% through business process automation and advanced technology integration
- Thanks to our SAAS-based software model, our customers simply pay a flat-rate monthly subscription fee for the modules they use – not expensive up-front software licenses. Any initial integration is typically completed in a short time for a modest time and materials fee. more about our platform
- Our platform is a flexible by design. Our energy management platform features open architecture and modular components – so you get what you need only when you need it
- We have been integrating with back-end systems, third party applications, meters, and devices for utilities for nearly 10 years. Integration with existing meters, data streams, and applications is straightforward and cost-effective. Through our standardized EIS Data Exchange and API Services layer, we connect to your existing infrastructure more effectively and rapidly than any other system
- Thanks to our hardware partners, we can utilize almost any meter system, and offer in-home displays and a complete suite of control devices – the majority of which have been already integrated with our system and field-tested
- Our in-home energy management systems have been shown to reduce energy usage between 15 and 30 percent, depending on the level of customer engagement and type of program, incentive, and hardware offered