Utilities agree that behind-the-meter intelligence has far reaching applications across operational areas – enabling enhanced customer experience and engagement as well as agile, precision grid planning and load management.
“We’re seeing transformational change in all these different areas. And something that underpins all that change is technology. So to be successful, we need to be successful at that foundation — a big part of which is data,” explained Chris Campbell, Salt River Project’s Senior Director of Distribution & Technology Operations in a recent Bidgely interview. “I’ve always said that those utilities who leverage their data for operational insights will be the ones that will be really successful in these transformative efforts.”
Andrew Barrington, Products and Services Manager at Avista says that as departments share information and data-driven discoveries, it inspires new questions and prompts the rethinking of legacy problems with new approaches:
“It’s not just a single individual or a single department. It has to be cross-functional. It has to be a conversation amongst your utility,” he notes. “I’m proud to say that Avista has achieved that. We have a lot of awareness around big data. We have a functional group of about 15 users, and we meet with Bidgely every other week to come up with new use cases and talk through how we can take the data we have and elevate it further. We are able to continuously ask questions like, ‘Can we track what the potential growth is?’ or ‘Could we learn a little bit more about where this trend is going?’”
As Campbell and Barrington point out, strategic initiatives are more successful when organizations embed data as an input business-wide. In the utility sector, behind-the-meter energy intelligence derived from load disaggregation has the capacity to enhance existing grid and customer systems to maximize performance across the board.
Democratizing Disaggregation
Bidgely has long been recognized as the trailblazer in AI-based energy disaggregation, having pioneered the science and spent the last decade partnering with energy companies worldwide to refine and perfect our approach. Our patented UtilityAITM extracts crucial energy use insights from meter data, such as time of use, DER proliferation and appliance adoption.
We submitted our first meter data disaggregation patent more than 10 years ago and have since secured more than a dozen disaggregation-based patents as part of a continuously expanding treasury of data science innovation.
Now, Bidgely is introducing Disaggregation as a Service (Daas), making the same patented AI-powered energy intelligence used in our own UtilityAI solutions available in API format for utilities and their partners to consume across a wide range of use cases. Our goal is to maximize the availability of the data and democratize behind-the-meter data use across the industry.
With DaaS, utilities and energy retailers are able to leverage highly accurate energy intelligence across operational areas. They can empower their vendors with the same data insights to ensure all utility-affiliated programs and messaging are personalized, targeted, less costly, more effective, and consistent.
Consistency across utility-customer interactions is very important. Historically, a utility may have had multiple departments and vendors engaging with customers across different programs. Each stakeholder likely used their own technology, which made it more likely that customers would receive conflicting messages. By contrast, when all parties are operating from the same DaaS-informed ground truth, customer touchpoints reinforce one another and contribute to the collective success of all programs.
Real-World DaaS Opportunities
A broad ecosystem of energy industry partners can benefit from DaaS to unlock additional value delivered by their solutions.
1) Customer Engagement and Customer Satisfaction
Even as one of the industry’s leaders in customer engagement and satisfaction solutions, we recognize we can’t cover the entire utility-customer relationship. So we want to enable other energy customer engagement players and vendors with DaaS to build personalization into every customer’s interaction — from the call center to digital platforms.
2) Cloud Partners
We see Snowflake, Amazon, Google, Azure and others helping utilities migrate their data and solutions from on-prem to the cloud. Working through those partners, DaaS can leverage their data management ecosystems to extract insights rapidly.
3) Targeting
When it comes to demand response programs and recruiting customers into thermostat, water heater, pool pump, heat pump and other device upgrade programs, DaaS can make targeting the right customers easy — i.e. only those who actually need a new device or appliance based on actual energy performance data.
DaaS reveals which customers have degrading appliances, pools, electric vehicles and more. As a result, utilities can avoid spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on Google AdWords, Facebook ads and other traditional mass marketing tactics because they know exactly which customers are best-suited for a given program and can target them directly.
4) Grid Planning
There are a wide range of vendors supporting the industry in planning for the grid of the future by striving to answer critical questions about when existing infrastructure is likely to degrade and where new infrastructure investments should be made.
The appliance-level insights that disaggregation reveals can be aggregated to provide actionable intelligence about grid assets, such as feeders and substations. With DaaS, utilities can bolster their grid planning solutions with a bottom-up, granular understanding of grid load.
For example, EV load forecasting is more accurate when based on current adoption patterns as evidenced by household energy use. If the current EV growth rate in a given area is accelerating rapidly, it may signal that in 12 to 18 months, a utility could run out of capacity in that area. DaaS can help expose those real-world EV proliferation trends so planners can understand their impacts reliably and act accordingly.
Global Opportunity
DaaS is available to utilities and energy retailers worldwide. Bidgely is currently working in 12 countries on six continents and can stand up DaaS in new regions on a rapid timeline. Though access to data and methodologies used by utilities and energy retailers vary by location, what doesn’t change is the value of Bidgely’s UtiltyAI disaggregation technology to engage modern energy consumers and make the grid more resilient.
Take the Next Step
If you’d like to explore more DaaS use cases and how the partners in your ecosystem can benefit from infusing Bidgely’s energy insights into their products, we’d love to hear from you.