As the smart grid gets deployed, utility-customer relationships that have been relatively unchanged for decades are about to revolutionized. Providing two-way information flow and putting more decision-making ability and control in the hands of the consumer is critical. And with that comes more responsibilities on the part of the utilities to service those consumers. Those were some of the recurring themes at the recent Energy Central webinar, “Reshaping the Customer Relationship through Smart Grid,” sponsored by SAP.
From the utility perspective the operations benefits of smart grid are well known: fewer estimated meter reads; remote hookup and disconnect capabilities; fewer service status calls; outage protections; the advent of dynamic priding programs; energy management in the home; and a few others.
But there are brand new operational issues as well, pointed out by Lisa Olmstead, vice president of customer care, Commonwealth Edison in northern Illinois. “We know that new and more complex pricing programs are going to require changes to our bill format, and anytime we change a bill format we’re going to generate calls to our center. Those calls will be long as we explain all the information to our customers,” she said.
ComEd has 3.8 million customers. It is now engaged in a smart meter pilot with 131,000 units in nine towns and a portion of Chicago. Installation started in November and will continue through May.
The Salt River Project, which serves the metropolitan Phoenix area, has one of the longest-running programs that have engaged customers with the nascent smart grid. It has 950,000 customers and since 2005 SRP has deployed 460,000 smart meters. “Not only can we receive data, but we can push data for example, if there are software upgrades, we can remotely send it to the meters,” said Carrie Young, the manager of residential customer services.
Customers are also more involved in their own energy management, thanks to their smart meters. “As customers are getting more tech savvy, and willing to access self-service transactions, we have deployed ‘My Account,’ and developed online offerings. Customers can get their smart meters to give them e-notifications based on thresholds that they set.”
SRP also has the largest pre-payment program in North America, with 100,000 customers enrolled, which has greatly reduced delinquent accounts.
Paul Lau, assistant general manager, customer distribution and technologies, for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District in California, said the municipal utility has engaged focus groups to help determine how it will manage the emerging new customer relationships. “What we heard from our customers was they want more transparency and control, more information that leads to more efficient energy use,” he said. “We really had a vision with this game-changing technology, to see what we could do for our community.”
As customers become more familiar with the technology, lessons learned in these early stage programs will provide a knowledge base for how best to manage the shifting customer relationship as the smart grid is more widely deployed.
I recently interviewed Andrew Heath at Esource on smart meter technology and how it is changing the relationship and communication channels that utilities are using. I am interested to hear the other side of this coin.
http://priorityresults.com/blog/interview-with-and...
@brianbierbaum
Brian Bierbaum
We've had some pretty long debates on other forums on Smart Customer engagement. The main thing seems to be to engage the customer in dialogue before you start the program. This gets them thinking about the impact of the way they use electricity (cf Dave's comment) and their concerns with the future. The Market and Operators will also get an idea of how the customer (or rather their automatic control system) might react to new price models.
My full text on Customer Engagement (Future Power Systems 21) is available via links on my Bio and the summary follows. I'm not sure however if you can link to my summary from this comment, although I can see an Author's Bio link to Bill above. FPS22 looks at Strategy and Value in the New World; we have loads of Technology to play with but we need to deploy and integrate it correctly to give the right result!!
1) The change from fixed preset single or two rate daily tariff to ToU has a major impact. Try going in stages via more preset rates (time of day, day of week, season etc).
2) Put up a safety net at each progression with the old and next tariff in parallel. Allow the customer to pay the cheaper at each billing point but try and help them see where behavioural change would make the new tariff more advantageous.
3) Predictive ToU, being sequences of firm then non-firm prices updated at regular intervals, would seem to be more effective in getting useful Customer reaction. This however has a big impact on Meter design and upstream processing. Make the meter (Customer Interface) unit flexible as regards data content.
4) Get the data together for customer reaction vs price (Site Import/export change) from the interface; quite a complex function which varies depending on preceeding profiles of price level and activity. Use the Smart interface to get intelligence on appliance action.
5) Don't try using raw marginal prices (10x at peak etc) as a tariff signal to a large part of the customer demand base or you will throw the load curve all over the place. That will result in inefficient operation of generation.
Set the price to get the customer reaction to remove just the high price generation.
(P.S I have experience in the area of marginal price signals in getting the big Iterative Generation-Fuel models to converge).
6) What we are aiming to do is to 'flatten the fossils'; i.e. reduce running periods for this plant but also make sure that the remaining fossil plant runs up and down at max rate and is then loaded flat out when on the bars (FPS20). That requirement shape will not necessarily follow the demand curve, especially where large amounts of variable output renewables (e.g. Big Wind) are installed.
7) All the Customer controls need to be automatic; we need good HAN, BMIS and Industrial Control mechanisms with suitable AI to help the customer set up the strategy logic.
8) There is also of course the concept of supplier or operator trading kW 'blocks' across time with the customer, where the resultant customer action can be proved and therefore charged/credited.
9) The intelligent Customer-Utility Interface (CUI - 'meter' is too restrictive a term), needs to be a flexible unit within a flexible Standards 'framework' for data content. This will ensure that new data structures can be incorporated as we develop the methodologies for customer participation. I believe this is the message coming out of the consultation by the GB Regulator (OFGEM). This approach also of course allows 'interoperability' in that the same meter can be used by different suppliers with different tariff and customer trading structures. Thus, if the customer changes supplier the 'interface unit' (meter+++) does not need to be changed.
10) One size will most definitely not fit all. Different solutions will be appropriate on different Power systems and for different customer groups.
11) Don't try making too many changes at once. If, for instance, you increase the electricity price (rate) basis while installing smart meters, the customer will target the new meter as the reason for any bill increases whereas it is in fact the underlying price (rate) increase which is responsible.