Engaging the Customer: The Power Behind the Meter

The KEMA guidebook on leveraging new dimensions of the utility-customer relationship

KEMA’s third Utility of the Future Leadership Guidebook offers insight into how technology, demographics, environmental concerns, and policies are changing the way electricity consumers view utilities. It also draws lessons learned from utilities’ longstanding efforts to manage load in the short term and modulate load growth in the long term.

 

This guidebook aims to provide information that will help leaders in the electric utility industry harness demand-side resources to achieve their operational and strategic goals, juxtaposed with providing greater customer value to ensure success.

 

The customer opportunity and challenge

The growth of the Internet and Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) has opened exciting new possibilities for electricity users and their suppliers. Customers expect increasingly sophisticated equipment, control technologies, and service offerings, and are finding these in the marketplace. Utilities and other electricity suppliers must rely with increasing urgency on active customer participation in load reduction and management to ensure system reliability and economic success. The Utility of the Future must provide greater customer value in exchange for the ability to influence and control demand so as to reduce financial and environmental costs and risks.

 

On the other hand, many challenges—technical, regulatory, and organizational—remain to fully integrate demand-side resources into the design and operation of electric systems. Foremost, utilities must convince and enable customers to invest voluntarily in long-term demand reduction and to participate actively in short-term demand response. In addition, whereas AMI and technologies like the Internet provide flexible communication channels on both sides of the meter, it is now necessary to find the most effective content for those channels.

 

The Virtual Power Plant
A future vision of customer and utility interaction is the Virtual Power Plant (VPP). The VPP enables the utility to supply customers’ energy service needs, while minimizing the cost and risk associated with investment in peak generation capacity, baseload plants, and transmission facilities. Whereas the VPP represents a significant new direction in utility planning and operations, many of its key elements are already in place—and penetration levels are growing as our energy technology moves toward distributed generation and electric storage.

Read more about the VPP in the complimentary chapter excerpt available in the right-hand column of this web page under “Downloads.” 

Volume 3 of KEMA’s Utility of the Future Leadership Guidebook is NOW AVAILABLE. Order your copy at the KEMA online store.