Bidgely is proud to be one of BPA’s qualified Section 13.2.5.2 – Behavioral Home Energy Report vendors, offering a unique next generation AI-powered HER and analytics bundle that delivers greater value without requiring additional spend. Download our BPA Quick Start Energy Efficiency program overview and watch the on-demand “Unlocking Expanded VALUE of Energy Efficiency” webinar to learn more about our approach.
The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) is a nonprofit federal power marketing administration based in the Pacific Northwest that provides ~28% of the electricity used in Idaho, Oregon, Washington, western Montana and parts of eastern Montana, California, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming as generated by 31 hydroelectric projects, one nuclear plant and several small power plants in the region. BPA also operates and maintains approximately three-fourths of the high-voltage transmission in its service territory. It’s customers include 142 cooperatives, municipalities, public utility districts, investor-owned utilities, tribal utilities and more.
Leveraging BEE Programs to Drive Savings Potential
BPA has been a leader in testing and implementing Behavioral Energy Efficiency (BEE) programs for more than 10 years, offering multiple energy efficiency programs to its member utilities to help to drive savings potential. Their latest BPA-qualified measure,“Section 13.2.5.2 – Behavioral Home Energy Reports,” was introduced in 2020 to focus on realizing BEE-related residential energy savings from changes in behavior and decision-making. Through this measure, BPA provides its utility customers with a deemed Unit Energy Savings (UES) value of $12 for each single-family or multi-family household that receives at least four paper Home Energy Reports (HERs) over the course of one year. The program can also be extended to run longer than the required one-year term. The HERs must include seasonal energy information, a similar home comparison, and tips and strategies as to how households can reduce their energy usage.
It’s easy to understand why BPA does so much to encourage BEE initiatives. A traditional residential energy efficiency portfolio that includes such things as retrofits and appliance rebates costs an average of 17 cents per kwh saved. BEE programs, on the other hand, cost approximately 2.7 cents per kwh saved, making them a far better utility investment. Not only are the savings impressive, next-generation HER programs also maximize customer engagement and customer impact on an ongoing basis, which provides a greater ROI over time and an ancillary uplift to other customer-facing programs. Given that BPA is also refunding its utility customers’ program costs, the Section 13.2.5.2 – Behavioral Home Energy Reports program value proposition is incredibly compelling.
BPA utilities can also look to the success that Clark Public Utilities, Seattle City Light and Puget Sound Energy have realized with HER programs as a proof point for the validity of this approach in the Pacific Northwest market. The three utilities ran programs in which more than 200,000 members participated, realizing a weighted average savings of 448.5 kWh. The overall incremental cost was $14 and the benefit to cost ratio was 3.1.
Bidgely’s Value-Added BPA HER Solution
Bidgely is proud to be one of BPA’s qualified Section 13.2.5.2 – Behavioral Home Energy Report vendors. More than the required four annual paper reports, we’re able to offer BPA customer utilities a unique next generation AI-powered HER and analytics bundle that delivers greater value without requiring additional spend.
Bidgely’s personalized Paper + Email HER program generates 80% higher savings than paper-only HER programs as measured by M&V. That success is due in large part to the fact that Bidgely’s HERs are crafted based on a deep understanding of household energy usage and behavior. Using disaggregated meter data and AI-powered analyses of actual household energy habits, Bidgely’s patented machine learning technology creates the world’s most accurate household energy profiles across 100+ attributes and delivers actionable insights for every home in a service territory. These insights are continuously improved and personalized as household members go about their daily lives and engage with the utility over time.
A deep understanding of household usage and behavior — including why customers behave the way they do and what opportunities they have to save — is essential to implementing a successful behavioral energy efficiency strategy. These highly accurate household energy profiles enable utilities to craft hyper-personalized paper + email HER communications that better encourage recipients to take energy savings steps. Household-specific HER communications are delivered at key points during the billing cycle featuring targeted, relevant, actionable and easy-to-digest information and recommendations that make it easier and more appealing to take action.
Bidgely’s next generation HER program success can also be attributed to the impact of digital communications. Digital HERs enable multiple touchpoints and ongoing engagement to encourage customers to take energy savings steps, which has translated into 2x savings realized by paper-only programs in peak summer months. Because of the immediacy of email HER delivery, digital HER programs deliver meaningful energy savings instantaneously, as customers take savings actions from day one.
Bidgely’s robust HER bundle extends BPA’s program’s benefits and significantly increases utility HER ROI with:
- More Frequent HER Customer Touchpoints: Beyond the BPA program requirement that four paper HERs be sent to program participants over the course of a 12-month period, utilities who partner with Bidgely will also be able to send participants 12 digital HERs at no additional cost. Bidgely’s HER programs earn more than 90 percent customer satisfaction rates — the highest in the industry. Our digital HERs see open rates click rates that are upwards of 40 percent, which is also higher than the industry average.
- HER Outreach to a Greater Number of Households: Layering on digital HERs to a paper program allows utilities to be more inclusive with their HER programs by extending them to greater numbers of households without increasing the budget requirement.
- Sustainable Savings – AI-powered HERs are responsive in content and design, providing customers with an always-fresh, hyper-personalized perspective that sustains ongoing savings and realizes new efficiencies over time.
- Bundled Access to Analytics Workbench – Bidgely includes bundled access to the Analytics Workbench platform for BPA HER customers. Analytics Workbench is a utility-facing household-level energy analytics tool that allows utilities to explore load disaggregation results for all appliance categories on an ongoing basis. By using HERs along with Analytics Workbench utilities can not only better target HER programs, but also leverage the Analytics Workbench targeting tools to maximize participation in other BPA energy efficiency programs.
- A No-Cost Marketing Boost for Existing Energy Efficiency Programs: With no additional marketing dollars required, Bidgely’s personalized HER format provides multiple opportunities to seamlessly promote traditional energy efficiency programs with messaging targeted to each household about the specific benefits they can enjoy with participation. AI-powered HERs multiply the ROI of every program dollar spent — both due to greater energy efficiency gains as well as from improved customer engagement and satisfaction. As such, AI-powered HERs improve cost effectiveness for not only energy efficiency efforts, but also across the entire portfolio of utility programs.
With millions of data points informing Bidgely’s patented disaggregation algorithms, we are able to deliver this next-gen HER program for both smart meter and non-smart meter households.
Analytics Workbench Amplifies HER and Energy Efficiency Outcomes
Understanding which households have certain appliances and how they use them is essential to a successful HER program. Bidgely’s consumption-data-informed household profiles empower utilities with this information without having to ask customers or members to provide any information, and Analytics Workbench makes it easy to put that data to work.
Using Analytics Workbench, you can pinpoint who is charging or running their air conditioning at peak times, the relative efficiency of a household’s appliances, or electric vehicle charging habits — which not only allows utilities to create micro-targeted HERs, but also possible to better engage households in smart thermostat programs, EV load shifting programs and more. Analytics Workbench makes it easy for utilities with and without internal analytics teams to simply and efficiently generate filtered data sets that can be used to inform a broad range of segmenting and targeting applications, by quickly zeroing in on the customers best-suited for any program or plan. With Analytics Workbench, utility marketing teams are able to efficiently and affordably target members with specific programs as a segment of one.
Test drive Analytics Workbench at Bidgely’s demo portal.
A Customized Approach
We recognize that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to next generation HER design, and are eager to work with BPA customer utilities to craft an HER+analytics solution best suited to their members and strategic utility goals. Download our BPA Quick Start Energy Efficiency program overview and watch the on-demand “Unlocking Expanded VALUE of Energy Efficiency” webinar to learn more about our approach.
