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 guidebook offers insight into how technology, demographics, environmental concerns and policies are changing the way consumers view utilities. The guidebook summarizes and draws lessons learned from utilities’ longstanding efforts to manage load in the short term and modulate load growth in the long term.

 

This volume provides leaders in the electric industry with information and insights to harness demand-side resources to achieve their operational and strategic goals, juxtaposed with providing greater customer value to ensure their success.

 

KEMA examines the experience of energy efficiency, demand response, retail competition, and dynamic pricing programs through the past two decades and beyond, to understand how to provide that customer value while achieving operational goals. Key topics include:

• Key drivers and barriers of customer segments

• Utility-customer relationship shift to demand-side management

• Change in customer interactions with the grid through new customer-side technologies

• Development of new demand-side offerings

• New vision for the modern, electric grid

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.

 

KEMA’s Utility of the Future Volume 3 will be available to order online during summer 2010.Sign up to receive notice of the volume’s release.