According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) the average residential customer used 899 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per month, while the average commerical customer used 6,019 kWh per month. These figures indicate that, on average, commercial customers consume nearly 7 times more electricity per month than residential customers, making small and medium business (SMB) customers an essential partner in achieving decarbonization goals and long-term grid resiliency.
In an era of rising energy costs and evolving customer expectations, utilities face the challenge of maintaining strong relationships with their business customers.
The good news is, just as Home Energy Reports (HERs) play a foundational role in residential customer engagement, so too do Business Energy Reports (BERs) foster greater participation and satisfaction among SMB customers.
Rocky Mountain Power (RMP) credits its BER program as instrumental in boosting its J.D. Power Business ranking by 45 points between 2020 and 2021. The consistency of BER communications and the personalized insights they provide has strengthened SMB customer relationships across the board.
“Business customers are feeling a little bit disenchanted with rate increases, and they want to know that they have an energy partner in the utility,” explains Barb Modey, Customer Satisfaction Market Research Manager at PacifiCorp (parent company for RMP). “They are always looking for insights into their usage. What the utility can do is present them with those insights, and that helps them understand what’s going on with their energy use, maybe showing them things they didn’t know before.”
This focus on partnership represents a shift from traditional utility-customer dynamics to a more collaborative relationship. For RMP, establishing a regular cadence of communication has been transformative.
“Before we had the Bidgely reports, our communications with business customers was a little more sporadic. We would do maybe short campaigns or newsletters, and then we’d lose our momentum,” Modey notes. “The beauty of these reports is that they go out on a monthly basis. So, it’s a regular cadence and ongoing.”
The foundation of RMP’s engagement strategy lies in sophisticated data analysis. Using Bidgely’s patented disaggregation technology, the utility creates detailed energy profiles for each business customer, breaking down usage by equipment category and time of day.
Monthly summaries provide commercial customers with a snapshot of their energy use that includes equipment-level spending. This granular view enables businesses to make informed decisions about their energy consumption.
“Knowledge is power,” Modey emphasizes. “And if you can leverage that knowledge, then you can make better choices.”
This precise analysis allows SMBs to identify efficiency and cost-saving opportunities, both behavioral and through equipment retrofits. It also offers a more useful means to compare current bills against historic ones, with the usage detail needed to pinpoint exactly why a bill has gone up or down.
Rather than focusing solely on energy savings, RMP approached their BERs as a marketing and communication tool.
“We decided to not calculate savings from the programs,” Modey explains. “It was difficult to calculate savings because with business customers—there are fewer of them, for one. And then they’re so different. You might have hair salons or tire shops or restaurants, and how do you compare them in a savings model?”
This marketing-focused approach allowed the utility to be more flexible with messaging and expand its reach (no need for a control group!).
“We use the reports to get out other messages to customers, maybe about our wildfire mitigation plans, or to encourage them to update their contact information so we can reach them during emergencies,” says Modey. “And also to cross-promote other programs that might not be related, like we have EV charger incentives for business customers and renewable energy programs that they might be interested in.”
Rather than fund the BER program through a traditional demand side management budget, RMP used its demand side marketing budget – diverting a portion of the money that they traditionally spend on television and radio ads.
“We had to get buy-in from the corporate communications teams and the program managers because they were used to using the money in a certain way with the type of marketing they had been doing in the past,” explains Modey. “Redirecting some of those funds from their budgets into another channel was a shift. But after the initial set up, the reports become very affordable — you can’t do traditional direct mail for the cost of these email reports. And, then when we started to see customer satisfaction results improve, then they were totally on board.”
Beyond monthly energy use summaries, the SMB customer profiles enable RMP to identify personalized next-best insights and interactions for every business, and communicate recommendations via proactive alerts, such as bill breakdowns paired with product offerings like demand response for batteries, HVAC rebates, and more.
The resulting engagement program is consistent and relevant, establishing the utility as a partner that SMB customers can rely on.
“We’re offering them something other than a bill, but rather information about how to control their bills. With that information, they’re empowered to manage any rate increases and make smarter decisions about either the time of day that they’re using electricity or what equipment they’re using,” Modey says.
The results of the program have exceeded Rocky Mountain Power’s expectations. The utility has seen significant improvements in customer satisfaction scores across multiple dimensions, not just energy efficiency.
“The customers who recalled the reports gave us high marks across many categories within that survey. Everything from being more involved in the local community to helping the environment, which have nothing really to do with energy efficiency,” Modey states. “We saw a lift across most of the categories within the survey, not just energy efficiency.”
More remarkably, she says, “Even the customers who didn’t say they liked the Reports still gave us higher scores than those customers who did not recall receiving the reports.”
For utilities considering a similar approach, Modey offers practical advice.
“I would advise other utilities to consider whether they really need savings from this type of program. It’s not that the program won’t deliver savings — because they might come through indirectly if you link to your incentive programs — but you don’t necessarily need to attribute it to these reports to make them valuable.”
She also emphasizes that impeccable data shouldn’t be a prerequisite for getting a BER program started.
“Even if your data is not perfect — and I don’t know any utility that has perfect data — we don’t have email addresses for all of our customers. We don’t even know if all of those email addresses are going to the right customer or the decision maker… If we waited until our data was perfect, we would never do anything with business customers. So, you have to start somewhere. Your data quality will improve as you go.”
As J.D. Power has emphasized in their survey report, far too many business customers are not receiving proactive outreach from their utility. It’s incumbent upon utilities to change that reality and establish a stronger collaboration with their SMB customers.
“If we hadn’t done the reports, then I don’t think our customer satisfaction would be as high with our business customers. In fact, I know it wouldn’t be as high,” Modey concludes.
For RMP, the consistent engagement, personalized insights, and proactive communication have transformed their relationship with SMB customers. Since 2020, RMP’s SMB customers have been receiving monthly BERs. Ongoing survey measurement continues to reveal strong engagement with the Reports and a lift for customer satisfaction.
“Our goal is to use BERs to advance our SMB customers from awareness to participation. And with that evolution, the by-product is a more satisfied customer.“
If you would like to learn more about RMP’s Business Energy Reports program and Bidgely’s SMB engagement capabilities, download the Bidgely SMB Solution Brief or visit bidgely.com/solutions/small-medium-business.
Hear more from PacifiCorp’s Barb Modey by watching the on-demand webinar: “Secrets of SMB Success: Rocky Mountain Power’s Award-Winning CX.”
The flywheel effect represents a powerful business model where multiple interconnected actions create a positive feedback loop, driving continuous, accelerating growth.
Amazon’s meteoric rise to a $2.5 trillion market cap exemplifies this concept perfectly. As customer numbers grew on their platform, more sellers and products were attracted to join, which in turn drew even more customers — creating an ever-accelerating cycle of value and growth.
Not unlike the pre-Amazon retail industry, legacy utility operations for power generation, distribution, and customer engagement have traditionally followed a linear value chain. Grid operations and customer interactions have seldom functioned as an integrated system. Today, however, this conventional paradigm faces unprecedented challenges as increasing adoption of electric vehicles, renewable energy sources, and battery storage systems enable consumers to actively participate in grid management.
The energy landscape is evolving as billions of decisions made by hundreds of millions of stakeholders — utilities, customers, regulators, and others — reshape how energy is produced, stored, managed, and consumed. Utility operations are developing into connected energy platforms that mirror Amazon’s integrated ecosystem.
And just as the retail sector was disrupted by the flywheel effect, the utility industry’s flywheel has begun to turn and is gaining momentum. Let’s explore how this new paradigm is taking shape to create the resilient grid of the future.
The utility flywheel begins with meaningful customer engagement.
As EVs, renewables, and other distributed energy resources (DERs) gain widespread adoption, we’re seeing significant variations in both their geographical distribution and DER types. Data indicates that even neighboring zipcodes may see as high as a tenfold difference in EV ownership. Likewise, customers may choose to install an L1 or L2 charger depending on their charging needs.
These variations make it clear that treating customers region-wide as a single uniform cohort is no longer effective. To truly resonate with customers, utilities must employ messaging and engagement strategies tailored to each customer’s unique appliance usage, EV/solar DER ownership, and lifestyle preferences.
Fortunately, by leveraging Bidgely’s UtilityAI™ Platform, utilities can now detect which customers have EVs, solar installations, or inefficient appliances, while also defining each customer’s energy use patterns across these devices. This allows utilities to hyper-personalize messaging with relevant insights and calls to action. For EV owners, for instance, messaging can be customized based on charger type, charging patterns, and whether they’re enrolled in time-of-use (TOU) rate plans.
This is how the flywheel is set in motion: by delivering exceptional, personalized customer experiences that foster positive sentiment toward the utility and motivate active participation in supporting the grid.
The second part of the flywheel focuses on intelligence-driven grid planning.
Behind-the-meter (BTM) customer energy use data provides utility grid analysts with critical insights into where grid assets face constraints — identifying whether distribution transformers, substations or feeders are experiencing peak-time overload and understanding the root causes. As mentioned earlier, these BTM insights are especially valuable at both the home and circuit level due to the significant geographical and device-type variations in DER adoption patterns.
Bidgely’s AI-enabled platform helps identify which customers own solar, EVs, and/or batteries, the type of EV chargers they use, and their charging patterns. UtilityAI™ provides a granular understanding of appliance-level energy consumption patterns for every individual customer on an hourly, daily and monthly basis to help utilities pinpoint those customers who have the greatest load shaping or shifting potential to alleviate grid constraints.
Bottom-up load aggregation of these “disaggregation-based BTM insights” further empowers utility teams to proactively identify where grid assets — transformers, feeders or substations — are likely to become stressed in the future.
This brings us to the last part of the flywheel: load management.
Efforts to manage peak load through demand response can take multiple forms: shimmying, shedding, shifting, and shaping. Among these, load shifting and load shaping prove most effective for addressing long-term grid stability as DERs scale.
With Bidgely’s AI-based disaggregation of BTM data, utilities not only gain access to energy usage by appliance, they can also identify specific appliance types — including EVs, and gas vs. electric appliances — as well as consumption patterns that reveal whether an individual home consistently uses energy during peak hours or exhibits off-peak, low-load tendencies. Thus, utilities are able to better target program recruitment to the ideal customers for load shaping or shifting.
The synergistic benefit here is clear: because utilities have already leveraged disaggregation to deliver exceptional, hyper-personalized customer experiences, these target customers are primed to become willing participants in demand response programs.
Participating in such programs reduces overall energy footprint and costs for customers, thereby further enhancing customer experience and bringing us full circle to the beginning of the flywheel, where it continues to turn with increasing momentum.
Just as Amazon’s flywheel inspired a retail evolution, the energy space is now poised for its own transformative flywheel transition.
If you would like to learn more about how an integrated approach to customer engagement, grid planning and load management can accelerate growth and resilience in your organization, reach out to our team to schedule a live demo.
I’m thrilled to share some exciting news: Bidgely has acquired Grid4C, a leader in AI-based predictive analytics for the energy industry.
This acquisition marks a significant moment for Bidgely, solidifying our leadership position in AI-powered energy intelligence. Combining our industry-leading AI with strategic acquisitions like Grid4C allows us to deliver unprecedented innovation and value to the energy sector.
Grid4C is a recognized leader in the predictive energy analytics space, with close to 10 patents to its name, and has developed novel solutions around fault detection & diagnostics of home appliances and grid assets, as well as load and DER forecasting.
The company, backed by strategic investors such as Alectra Utilities and Engie, has gained traction among North American, APAC, and European utilities through these very relevant offerings that help solve the industry’s big challenges.
I’m also pleased to welcome Dr. Noa Rimini, Founder and CEO of Grid4C and a PhD in artificial intelligence and machine learning as well as the Grid4C team to Bidgely. We look forward to their contributions to our UtilityAI platform of customer- and grid-facing solutions. Dr. Rimini is an engineering and data science leader, which will only further supercharge our data science leadership team
and the value outcomes we deliver to our utility partners as an Energy Intelligence leader.
Grid4C’s solutions are an excellent complement to our existing platform. This acquisition will strengthen the core capabilities of Bidgely’s UtilityAI™ Platform and expand support for new use cases.
Specifically, Grid4C’s fault detection and short-term load forecasting solutions bring powerful enhancements:
This acquisition signals a new growth era for Bidgely. For over a decade, we have been focused on developing our own data science and solutions, and have built organically built out a client portfolio encompassing dozens of utilities around the world and tens of millions of utility customers served.
Now, with this first strategic acquisition, we’re accelerating that trajectory. We are well-positioned as a growing partner for the future, to help utilities innovate and tap into the power of AI to solve their biggest grid and customer engagement challenges and to help drive the clean energy transition.
I had the pleasure of sharing the mic with NV Energy’s Director of Integrated Energy Solutions Adam Grant on The Edison Electric Institute’s Electric Perspectives podcast. During the broadcast, Adam and I shared our thoughts about how AI-powered technology is advancing electric transportation programs.
Adam kicked off the discussion by describing what led NV Energy to look to AI-driven EV solutions.
“We’ve been using Bidgely’s UtilityAI platform as our overall tool for our customer solutions since 2017, starting with customer experience and energy efficiency and now moving into EVs,” Adam explained. “We used Bidgely’s behind-the-meter intelligence—technology that analyzes energy usage patterns at the household level—to identify customers who had high usage load and were also charging their electric vehicles on peak. With Bidgely, we were able to detect not only the type of charger being used, but also when it was being used – which empowered us to precisely target EV owners with peak charging behaviors.”
Bidgely’s EV Solution not only detects electric vehicles and helps utilities understand their load patterns, but we also provide a data-driven approach to better engage those customers to help them optimize their charging habits and reduce their bill.
“As utilities, we need to recognize that every customer has their own unique charging habits,” he went on to say. “Some charge as soon as they get home. Others charge overnight. And some charge at different times based on convenience. And when the customer charges is just as important to grid management as the charging itself. Our goal was to use this deeper understanding of EV behaviors to inform new EV managed charging programs we’ve proposed to our commission, and really put forth a program for customers that effectively shifts the charging load.”
The deeper understanding of EV behaviors that Adam mentioned is the foundation of Bidgely’s EV Solution. We believe identifying electric vehicles on the grid and their charging patterns is not just AI for the sake of AI. This intelligence has the potential to make a tangible impact on the system itself. When a utility is able to really understand who’s charging and how they’re charging, it becomes possible to take informed action to support grid modernization and grid stability and scale it rapidly.
Scalability is crucial. There is no silver bullet in the realm of EV management or EV customer engagement. That’s why Bidgely’s EV solution is designed to engage the full range of customers with different ways they can participate — serving the full EV owner customer base both today, as well as when that population grows to hundreds of thousands of customers.
According to the International Energy Association, new electric car registrations totalled 1.4 million in 2023, increasing by more than 40% compared to 2022. JD Power expects EV sales to reach 36% of the total U.S. retail market by 2030 and 58% by 2035. For a mid-sized utility, this could mean managing thousands of new distributed energy resources within just a few years.
As Adam said, “When it’s time to make the leap from our trial program to the thousands of customers who will be participating in the future, we recognize that it’s going to take significantly more EV detection, targeting and personalized customer outreach to engage the greatest number of customers who are best-positioned to realize benefit for themselves and the grid.”
NV Energy is leading the way in deploying AI and other technology solutions to hyper-personalize and target its programs, including its approach to rate design.
Given Nevada’s primary industries, granular household appliance-level data is incredibly important to informing new tariffs. As Adam described, Las Vegas is different from other major metropolitan areas.
“Beyond the electrification challenges which every large city is beginning to face, the casino industry makes us a 24-hour town,” he said. “Everyone in our community doesn’t work 9 to 5, or even, 6 to 2. A large number of our customers work graveyard and overnight. So there are people who are home during the day when the time of use doesn’t necessarily work for them. So that’s another challenge here in Nevada, is to have the behind-the-meter insights to create a mix of opportunities for our customers that are unique to the schedules they have.”
NV Energy’s strategy of layering different types of offerings encourages participation of the broadest possible range of customers, whether it is through active managed charging, or a time of use rate that provides a way to save money on their own schedule. Not every customer is going to want the full automation of managed charging, but they may be enticed by a program that allows them to save money by scheduling their car’s charging during a reduced TOU rate period.
It’s important to recognize that there is not one optimal end-all solution. Instead, we have to be responsive to the fact that the solutions we offer need to align with customers’ varied charging habits.
“Our approach is multifaceted,” Adam emphasized. “It has behavioral components. It’s got the tariff. It’s got the technology components. So it really is a full strategy to make sure that we have the ability to serve as many customers as possible.”
NV Energy’s approach to EV management will serve them well. They’re leveraging their behind-the-meter intelligence to implement a comprehensive approach to manage their EV load. Even if you’re not yet seeing the stress of EV adoption in your territory, you will soon, and it will be exponential in its growth. Utilities can’t fail to take steps now, assuming it will be possible to deploy an effective large scale EV program after adoption reaches scale.
Across the country, we are seeing a number of exciting EV program trials. But we can’t stay in trial mode much longer. We have to expand quickly to bigger and better programs and learn from these experiences.
“We know that electric vehicle load is coming. We know potential building electrification load is coming. And we know that, especially in our territory in the desert southwest, extreme heat is a reality. I think we had 32 straight days over 110 degrees last summer. So having that extra load from EV chargers and buildings on top of cooling load is significant,” Adam said.
“We need to find the most effective ways to shift EV load to periods when we have excess renewable energy in our system so that we don’t have to build that next power plant. Sure, we’re going to have to expand our generation capacity over the long haul. But we’re designing our EV program to allow us to delay that step. It’s much less expensive to put these programs in place – which of course also allows us to provide more price stability for customers.”
At the end of the day, commissions will play a very active role in determining whether to continue, expand or refine EV program investments. Across regulated territories, we’re seeing three key aspects to success.
Customer Engagement and Satisfaction – High performing EV programs will enhance, rather than detract from, the utility-customer relationship. Measuring customer satisfaction with the program and their understanding of how it relates to their energy bill will be a key metric as the utility company becomes the new gas station.
Load Shifting – We need to measure the ability of each electric vehicle to contribute to a kW shift off-of-peak. Doing so requires measuring the before and after – i.e. normally this customer would have contributed Y kW on an average demand day, but now we’re able to reduce that, or shift that to X kW.
This is particularly important when bringing incentive dollars into the mix. We need to begin to equate incentive ROI to the relative value a customer provides to the system. In other words, if a customer is already charging their vehicle at midnight, it does not make sense to offer them an incentive. Rather, we have to intelligently target the right customers -– those who are on constrained feeders or charging on-peak — and shift the metric for success from the number of vehicles enrolled in an incentive-driven program to kW reduction per participant, and begin compensating customers not for their participation but rather for their kWs.
Potential Savings – If you’re filing an IRP or a transportation electrification plan, what can you actually count on in terms of economic benefit and lower infrastructure impact? What can a grid operator rely on? It’s important to quantify the amount of grid support an EV program has the potential to deliver.
Highlighting that customer engagement is the foundational metric, Adam said, “I think that the main thing that we are learning is that education is the most important thing up front — really defining what the parameters are for the customer, so they understand the benefits that not only they’re getting for themselves, but also to the grid and price stability, because we don’t have to either buy power during the highest usage times, or build that next power plant or that peaker unit. Because, as we all know, customers are going to do what benefits them individually for the most part. So showing them their personal benefit is a really good start, and then layering onto that the benefits it has for the community and for everyone else could be really beneficial overall.”
The next big step is integrating that customer engagement into grid side planning and building full non wires alternatives programs.
Managing EV load is an essential part of an AI-driven, holistic approach to creating the resilient grid of the future.
Learn more by listening to the full EEI Electric Perspectives Podcast: AI-Powered Solutions for Transportation Electrification podcast.
For more than a decade, Bidgely’s advanced AMI analytics have empowered utilities with AI-powered Customer Experience (CX) solutions. Leveraging meter data and our patented appliance-level load disaggregation algorithms, our utility customers have achieved multi-quartile improvements in JD Power Scores, verified customer satisfaction ratings typically ranging from 80–90+ percent, and more than 1 TWh in energy efficiency savings.
In this legacy “AMI 1.0” world, home energy use data has been measured on the meter and transferred to the cloud for analysis, providing utilities with insights about what appliances were used the previous day. This actionable intelligence has allowed energy providers to guide customers to make smarter energy decisions, to more successfully engage them in behavioral programs and personalize, and to improve their overall energy experience.
However, as grid stress, customer expectations, and regulatory pressures steadily increase, the AMI 1.0 world is giving way to utilities investing in next-generation AMI 2.0 meters with more sophisticated capabilities for these new operational demands.
AMI 2.0 meters let utilities and technology innovators like Bidgely move the intelligence closer to the data source, enabling real-time insights and engagement at the grid edge.
For example, through a unique collaboration with Itron, Bidgely’s patented AI-powered applications are embedded within the physical meter.
“We see that the change on the grid for our utility customers is tremendous. And it really is driven by new behaviors behind the meter on the customer premises as consumers buy electric vehicles, install solar and adopt other new equipment. Of course, at the same time, the climate is changing and infrastructure is aging,” explains Itron Vice President Of Product Management, Stefan Zschiegner. “So now the opportunity with our latest generation of meters is to bring the computing power to the meter with a distributed intelligence or edge intelligence that processes data and enables communication. We’re offering utilities new ways to better connect the consumer to the grid, extend visibility and manage this influx of new requirements.”
“With our Grid Edge Intelligence solutions, we’re able to push apps similar to an iPhone,” adds Nipesh Patel, Itron’s Area Vice President, Strategic Sales. “We’ve collaborated with Bidgely to push some applications to the meter to identify, for example, when a new EV is connected to the grid or when PV is connected to the grid, and we’re already working with our existing customer base to bring that value to them. Having real-time data and making use of that data is going to drive a lot more value and enable the sort of hyper-scaling that the industry is now facing.”
As Patel mentioned, EV charging provides a compelling use case for the potential of AMI 2.0 technology. While Bidgely can already reveal on-peak charging that has occurred through analysis of AMI 1.0 data, with our intelligence at the grid edge, utilities can engage and coach their EV-owning customers in real-time about the impacts and costs of their charging choices.
The opportunity that Distributed Intelligence enables utilities to connect with consumers in new ways, opens up countless new use cases that were previously impossible.
“For example, you can not only detect whether there is a level-two charger on a customer premises, you can also engage with the consumer in real time to talk about their charging pattern, the time of the charging and the duration of the charging patterns – making targeted recommendations on what to do,” explains Zschiegner. “This makes it easier to engage customers in time of use programs, behavioral programs that are specific to electric vehicles, and other opt-in programs that give the power to the consumer while at the same time enabling the utility to provide a more reliable and better customer experience.”
Bidgely is pursuing a wide-range of AMI 2.0 use cases, including:
Demand Response
TOU Optimization
VPP Participation
“Imagine, if you have some issue or an unusual energy use pattern in your house, you could get a notification real time, not the next day,” adds Zschiegner. “There are endless opportunities to engage the consumer with our joint technologies that allow the utilities to truly become the trusted advisor and partner and source of information for the consumer. It’s an opportunity to really change the consumer utility relationship. And why is this so critical? Because it will allow utilities to more effectively engage with consumers who now play a critical role in extending the life of the grid in order to avoid costly grid upgrades and make aging infrastructure more reliable. We have a great opportunity to take customer engagement to a whole new level.
The evolution from AMI 1.0 and 2.0 will take time, and utilities must consider ways to leverage the benefits of each type of meter through the transition.
Bidgely’s CX platform delivers valuable insights through both traditional cloud-based AMI analytics and innovative DI applications, covering all your customers, regardless of meter deployment timelines to maximize a utility’s AMI investment. As new meters are deployed, customers and utilities see value from both sides of the solution.
These combined capabilities work in unison to engage customers through a combination of real-time and monthly insights.
“The collaboration between Itron and Bidgely goes way back. In fact, we have a long term relationship that started off with the fundamental idea that ‘meter data that is highly accurate, highly precise and more frequent’ is the foundation to better insights,” says Zschiegner. “The right data streams make insights easily accessible and provide the context that is going to be critical in delivering advanced analytics. So we look at our partnership, at this foundation, as very strategic and long term.”
In my role at Bidgely, I have the chance to speak with energy industry analysts on a fairly regular basis. Their insights about how the market is evolving serve as an integral part of Bidgely’s strategic planning process.
Bidgley’s recent conversation with Guidehouse Insights Associate Director Mike Kelly highlighted what he calls a “changing of the guard” in terms of industry motivations around software purchasing decisions that is putting customer engagement front and center when it comes to grid optimization.
“Over the past 3 to 5 years I’ve seen a shift from the traditional emphasis on ADMS, DERMS and other operations-oriented software solutions toward more customer-centric technologies,” he said. “There is a growing realization of the relevance of the consumer in facilitating operational and business efficiencies, and so ADMS and DERMS are now giving ways to terms like DER and DR engagement, which increasingly fall under the umbrella of what we call customer engagement.”
More specifically, Kelly said two customer-oriented operational trends demonstrating real impact are real-time intelligence and complex rate structures.
“When I say real time intelligence, I’m referring to behind-the-meter insights, he explained. “In terms of facilitating greater customer program adoption, engagement and enrollment, we’ve seen through multiple studies that customers respond better to real-time intelligence and real-time interactions.”
EV pricing provides a compelling use case.
“If you’re charging your EV during a peak pricing period, the ability to get that insight in real time versus maybe a 15-minute interval can have a tangible impact on the economic incentive for that customer to actually act,” he said. “And that’s just one example. There are a plethora of use cases that are either enabled or enhanced by the provision of real time insights.”
This evolution is made possible in part by hardware technology as manufacturers continue to introduce more sophisticated meters capable of providing real-time data streams across voltage, energy, current and out waveform. But sophisticated analytics are also a driver.
“This transition is being powered not only by the Itrons and Landis+Gyrs of the world, but also by open ecosystems of analytic partners such as Bidgely that are effectively leveraging their disaggregation technologies to maximize the value of those enhanced data streams,” Kelly explained.
Recognizing that the evolution to real-time-insight-based-solutions requires both advanced hardware and analytics, Bidgely is partnering with Itron to provide DI (distributed intelligence) “agents” for its next-generation meters that can detect and monitor EV charging and Solar PV. The solution is already being rolled out at several utilities, to provide
On the topic of complex rate structures, Kelly pointed out Western Europe, Japan and other comparative markets are leading the US when it comes to new and advanced rate structures beyond basic time of use.
“Have we seen some North American utilities effectively engage their customer bases in enrolling in these types of programs? Sure,” he said. “But to really engage customers with meaningful savings requires real time pricing, critical peak pricing and increasingly DER- and EV-oriented rate structures that are more hyper-personalized and really tailored to the individual and target a smaller subset of the population then a generic time of use. That’s where you can provide some of those more tangible economic incentives that I believe truly get customers to engage at a higher level.”
What these trends point to, Kelly said, is that there is a growing recognition amongst utility decision makers and vendors alike that the consumer — and especially the prosumer — should have a seat at the table when developing strategies for peak demand management and electrification.
Bidgley has worked with multiple utilities to identify and target EV owners for Time-of-Use rate enrollment and managed charging initiatives, resulting in high levels of peak load shift for EV charging. From these experiences, Bidgely has also found that, to effectively shift EV loads, a multi-faceted approach is most effective, including EV managed charging, EV time of use, and behavioral load shifting. In addition, engagement with EV owners must continue beyond enrollment through continued coaching touch points to make EV load-shift behaviors “sticky.”
In working with one utility to drive EV time-of-use (TOU) rate adoption, Bidgely found that after onboarding customers into the rate, their EV peak-time charging decreased by 70%. The ongoing coaching once they are on the rate helps reduce EV peak-time charging by an additional 26%.
To learn more about how Bidgely can help you harness the power of behind-the-meter insights to advance your customer engagement and load shift goals, visit our demo portal. To hear more from Guidehouse Insights and other industry leaders, sign up to receive more information about EmPOWER AI, Bidgely’s annual event where technology innovation meets utility leadership in navigating the clean energy transition.
To make a bad situation better, customers need clear answers to questions like, “Why is my bill so high?” and “What can I do about it?” Responses such as “it’s the weather” don’t go far to resolve customer frustration.
But Avista has succeeded in turning negatives into positives by equipping call center agents with Bidgely’s AI-enabled energy analytics about each customer’s personal energy use.
We sat down with Avista Customer Relationship Representative Connor Hennessey at Bidgely’s EmPOWER AI conference, and he shared how the Avista customer service team is leveraging Bidgely’s High Bill Analyzer to improve the customer experience for these challenging calls.
Connor shared how Bidgely’s energy insights and personalized customer recommendations are amplifying their customer support efforts across the board, including a remarkable 27% reduction in truck rolls as well as reduced call handling time.
“In the old ways, when a customer came to us with a high bill, all that we had to go on – both the customer and the CSR – was the bill itself,” recalled Hennessey. “We’d be able to see the amount of kilowatt hours or therms, depending on if it was gas or electricity, but would have to dig in further on the calls to try to figure out where that energy usage might be coming from.
“We didn’t go into the conversation with any insights about whether the energy usage was linked to cooling or heating or entertainment or some other specific appliance. So what most often ended up happening is that we would send our field representatives out to those homes to do a meter test.
“And even with that test, the cause of a high bill might not become apparent. The customer would be left in a state of vagueness, and any sort of impactful follow up conversation on the part of the CSRs would be severely limited.”
But in 2020, things began to change as Avista partnered with Bidgley to leverage UtilityAITM in order to extract appliance-level energy intelligence from its AMI data and then use those insights to enhance customer service and experience.
Avista leadership made the strategic decision to start with internal use cases first before rolling out energy insights to customers, beginning with the call centers and high bill call support.
Avista equipped its CSRs with Bidgely’s CSR Console, giving them visibility into disaggregated energy use for each customer across multiple appliance categories at five-minute data intervals. This detailed behind-the-meter visibility, combined with personalized AI-recommendations in the portal, equipped the CSRs to troubleshoot high bill calls and advise customers on savings improvements.
“Now, Bidgely gives us a lot of data that we’re able to use on a daily basis to have more impactful conversations with customers that are outside what we were previously able to have,” he said.
“We’ve seen a 27 percent decrease in the amount of high bill truck rolls. And, when a truck roll is necessary, we’re able to empower our field service teams before they go out so they have an ability to identify what type of usage is going on in that house and can have a meaningful conversation with the customer when they’re on site.”
Hennessey said he heard a statistic that customers spend an average of only eight minutes interacting with their utility every year.
“We have to make the most of those eight minutes and really capitalize on the time we spend with our customers,” he emphasized. “Bidgely allows us to more efficiently and effectively identify ways that we can create higher efficiency for what they want to use in their homes, and provide that guidance in a way that meets them where they are – whether that’s talking with a CSR or looking at the website or self-serving in other ways.”
CSR adoption and feedback was strong, as evidenced in one very cold winter, as Avista’s CSR Portal was used over 3,000 times in December alone to address high-bill and other customer inquiries.
“High bill calls involve a lot of questions. Oftentimes when a customer gets a bill, they see the kilowatt hours, but they don’t know what a kilowatt hour is. It’s not really layman’s terms. But our ability to talk to them in terms they understand about what is actually going on in their home with their appliances and energy habits establishes a common language and allows us to take advantage of the full eight minutes we might have with a customer,” Hennessey explained.
“By utilizing the Bidgely tools, we’re able to have the types of conversations customers want to have to increase their education and help them self-serve — which ultimately helps us avoid high bill calls in the future and is part of the reason our average handle times are going down.”
Hennessey added, “I’m really excited about the ability for us to utilize Bidgely in our organization. And I think the options are really limitless in regards to how we want to utilize it and how it will make the lives of CSRs easier every day.”
To explore Bidgely’s UtilityAI™ High Bill Analyzer, visit our interactive demo portal, or reach out to our team to schedule a live demo.
But when it comes to AI’s application in the real world, you might say that the field was treading water for more than 60 years. It wasn’t until 2012 that Stanford developed deep learning algorithms, and the adoption of AI in the marketplace began to skyrocket.
Bidgely was founded that same year in 2012 –- well before real world applications for AI exploded as they have in the past decade. And in the years since, we’ve had the time to innovate the use of AI in the energy space and to perfect our UtilityAI™ platform.
In fact, Bidgely has built the energy industry’s only true disaggregation platform. Our patented disaggregation science has continuously served as the foundation for our industry-leading data science advances and AI innovation.
Bidgely’s UtilityAI platform analyzes whole-home meter data and looks for fingerprints unique to every appliance to accurately identify which appliances are running in a home, at what time, and how many kWhs they consume. In the case of some appliances, UtilityAI dives even deeper to identify whether an appliance is inefficient or near end of life – such as an HVAC that is short cycling or having saturation problems. Or in the case of EVs, we can determine the type of charging equipment in use – i.e. level 1, 2 or 3.
In the face of the tremendous pressures now facing the energy industry, true disaggregation provides the basis for a full spectrum of essential AI solutions — from customer engagement to infrastructure planning to grid resilience.
Grids are becoming more complex. Intermittent renewable energy is coming online at scale, including more behind-the-meter generation than ever before. Electric vehicles are introducing new loads, together with the near-term reality of bi-directional vehicle-to-grid energy flow.
At the same time, the number of stakeholders playing a critical role in energy supply and demand is growing and diversifying. Who is going to install solar panels? Who is willing to sell power onto the grid right now? Who is going to buy an EV? Who is going to replace an HVAC with a heat pump? Billions of choices made by hundreds of millions of people across utilities, customers, regulators, and other stakeholders will shape how energy is produced, stored, managed, and consumed. Consumers and the grid are coming together in never-before imagined ways to form a new integrated whole in which customers play a critical load-balancing role.
In this new paradigm, Bidgely has empowered utilities with applied AI tools that have been perfected over more than a decade. Using our AI-based true disaggregation as a foundation, we enable utilities to enhance customer engagement, energy efficiency and load shifting.
For example, disaggregation-based insights make it possible to identify that Customer X on Transformer Y is responsible for significantly increasing demand for energy because they have multiple EVs at home or an inefficient HVAC or pool pump. The utility is then able to target that household with a personalized offer to enroll in an EV TOU or managed charging program. Then, Bidgely’s award-winning customer engagement platform empowers utilities to achieve the level of customer participation required for meaningful load shift.
Utilities are also able to take those same behind-the-meter home energy use insights and roll them up to the transformer or feeder level to pinpoint which of their infrastructure assets are likely to see the greatest strain. This bottom-up grid view allows utilities to avoid unnecessary capital expenditure through data-informed non-wires alternatives.
In short, we have managed to bring together cutting-edge AI technology in a single platform that can target all the needs of the modern grid — the precise reason why we were recognized as a “Top 10 Applied AI Company” by Fast Company on their 2024 list of The World’s Most Innovative Companies, among other accolades.
Applied AI has been instrumental in equipping utilities to shift what has historically been a transactional, billing-based relationship with its customer base into an energy supply and demand optimization partnership.
When I say the words “Gen AI,” you’re likely thinking, ‘why do we need another ChatGPT?’ And more specifically, ‘Why do I need it as a utility?’
Generative AI in the energy space is much more than ChatGPT. Gen AI can help improve customer experience by making it easier and more satisfying to interact with their energy data.
Consider the impact of one of our first Gen AI tools: the Bidgely Energy Assistant.
We’ve established that load shifting now requires customers to be actively engaged in helping provide the solution. You might ask a customer to take steps to reduce stress on a particular transformer because they are one of the main contributors to the energy load on that asset. But how do you improve the likelihood that they will do their part?
A customer might ask the Energy Assistant “what is happening with my energy use?” Rather than provide a generic answer, the Energy Assistant is able to leverage behind-the-meter data for that household to provide an easy-to-understand and immediate natural language answer that is specific to that customer.
The Energy Assistant can also help customers evaluate the impact of energy decisions. For example, a residential customer might ask whether it makes sense to buy an EV, or upgrade an HVAC system or insulation. The Energy Assistant can run an analysis on that household’s energy data and quickly provide meaningful personalized recommendations, such as “your HVAC performance indicates it is nearing its end of life, you should consider an upgrade” or “your heating costs are higher than similar homes in your area, you should consider new insulation.” The tool goes even further: It can run the numbers, telling a customer how much they are likely to save in a year, and what their payback period is likely to be.
Our UtilityAI platform enhanced with generative AI meets customers where they are, and provides insights and recommendations that are immediate and accessible. The result is a better customer experience, higher CSAT and improved customer engagement, enhancing utility efforts to nurture the sort of energy partnerships with their customers that are essential to our future grid.
Bidgely’s Grid Assistant will provide powerful new interfaces that simplify grid management by empowering grid planners to analyze behind-the-meter data more quickly, conduct scenario planning more accurately, and determine where to upgrade infrastructure with even greater precision.
Utility teams will be able to pose questions such as “how will EVs grow in our territory?” or “which of my infrastructure assets are most likely to be over capacity from EV load?” Asset managers can also extrapolate and create different scenarios to assess how particular transformers are going to respond as supply and demand evolves both geographically and over time –- all based on AI-driven behind-the-meter insights.
Similarly, Bidgely’s Grid Assistant will equip program managers with new insights. To achieve a load shift goal, for example, requires engaging the right customers, for example asking a Grid Assistant to generate a list of accounts meeting a certain set of criteria such as customers who have both EVs and solar or inefficient HVACs. The assistant then helps target every customer with best-suited programs, whether they be TOU, managed charging or an offer for a specific type of EV charger or other appliance purchase or upgrade.
In addition to improving infrastructure management and program outcomes and reducing spend, Gen AI can also positively impact utility employee experience by increasing team member efficiency and providing critical insights that enable better performance outcomes.
Bidgely is uniquely positioned to fully unlock the value of Gen AI on behalf of our utility partners.
The quality of a Gen AI user experience depends on the accuracy of the data and insights used to train the AI. If that data is not accurate, your Gen AI will not work properly. Over more than 12 years, Bidgely has perfected the AI that transforms meter data into actionable insights. Our AI models have been trained on energy data from more than 30 million homes and businesses worldwide. Now, our UtilityAI’s Gen AI tools sit on top of that tried-and-tested AI platform.
I invite you to watch Empowering Utilities with GenAI:A Guide to Enhanced CX and Grid Management, our on-demand webinar that dives deeper into the potential use cases for Energy and Grid Assistants. Or, reach out to our team to schedule a demo and learn more about pilot opportunities.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How Rocky Mountain Power boosted SMB CSAT with Business Energy Reports
The 2023 J.D. Power Electric Utility Business Customer Satisfaction Study highlighted a concerning drop in business customer satisfaction (CSAT) among electric utilities, finding CSAT is at an all-time low of 754 on a 1,000-point scale.
However, despite this cautionary assessment, the report was decidedly optimistic about the future, suggesting that the path to reversing business CSAT decline is clear. Survey respondents overwhelmingly agreed that proven strategies like improving communication and providing more personalized service could significantly improve customer sentiment and turn things around.
In short, communication + personalization = transformational CSAT improvement.
Bidgely’s work with Rocky Mountain Power has demonstrated that this simple equation really does add up to big impact.
The utility began working with Bidgely in 2018 to advance its legacy Home Energy Reports program by leveraging disaggregation to help residential customers understand their energy usage breakdown and the associated costs.
“It was new and different, and it created a lot of engagement that generally created action. Customers were more aware, and it motivated them to make different energy use decisions,” explains Shawn Grant, Customer Innovations Manager at Rocky Mountain Power.
Improved customer engagement and expanded participation resulted in significant, measurable savings. In less than one year, customers were empowered to save 41GWhs of energy — including savings of one percent among average consumption customers.
Building on this residential HER program success, the utility set out to achieve similar benefits for its commercial customers.
“In 2020, we worked with Bidgely to create digital Business Energy Reports that went out to our small- and medium-sized business customers in three states — Utah, Idaho and Wyoming,” says Barb Modey, Customer Satisfaction Market Research Manager at PacifiCorp. “And the SMB engagement was really more than we expected. We didn’t use it as a savings tool. We pushed out communications that were not necessarily traditional energy efficiency messages.
“Instead, we sent messages about reliability, pricing, or community involvement — just a variety of things that we wanted our customers to know about. And after a full year of these reports, in 2021 we received our best JD Power business scores ever. In fact, it was just striking — it was a 35 point jump. We went from number 10 in the West up to the number two spot, and from number 54 to number 9 nationally. The Business Energy Reports worked so well that we rolled the program out to our sister company PacificPower the following year.”
Modey credits the consistent cadence of monthly communications for boosting overall engagement.
“Before we introduced Business Energy Reports, our communication with SMB customers was sporadic. We would come up with campaigns and have short bursts of contact with them either through direct mail or email, but then it would stop. It wasn’t a continuous effort. But now our reports go out twice a month, automatically. They hear from us consistently, month-after-month.
Interestingly, SMB customers who received the business energy reports also demonstrated an increase in awareness and satisfaction in unexpected areas.
“In our surveys, customers who had received the Business Energy Reports had higher scores across a wide range of measures — not just energy efficiency, but also environmental awareness, awareness about reliability pricing, and even better experiences with outages,” Modey says. “
“When we worked with Bidgely to design our reports, we decided to treat it as a marketing program, rather than as a savings program. That gave us a lot of freedom to not only fund it, but also to include messaging that might not be considered purely DSM [Demand-Side Management]. So we are able to work-in messages that touch on customer satisfaction drivers. We might talk about what we’re doing to improve infrastructure and reliability, how our vegetation management crews are out there working, or what we’re doing with wildfire mitigation. We include those along with tips about signing up for energy efficiency, or incentives for HVAC or lighting or other programs they might find valuable.”
As with their residential HER program, Rocky Mountain Power leveraged disaggregation — which separates energy use into appliance categories across time — to create an accurate and actionable profile for each customer and personalize its Business Energy Reports. In the case of business customers, profiles included energy usage and time of use by appliance for heating, cooling, lighting, refrigeration, and always-on.
The data analysis further identified appliance-specific, non-operating-hours usage and on-peak usage as key commercial customer insights.
Monthly summaries like Rocky Mountain Power’s Business Energy Reports provide commercial customers with a snapshot of their monthly energy use that includes appliance-level spending.
This detailed analysis allows SMBs to identify energy efficiency and cost savings opportunities, both behavioral and appliance retrofits. It also provides a more useful means to compare current bills against historic bills, with the usage granularity needed to pinpoint exactly why a bill has gone up or down.
Beyond monthly summaries, SMB customer profiles enable utilities to identify a personalized next-best insight and interaction for every SMB, and communicate recommendations with customers via proactive alerts, such as:
• High usage alerts paired with energy efficiency programs
• Bill projections paired with better rate offerings
• A bill breakdown paired with new product offerings like solar panels, batteries, HVAC rebates, etc.
The resulting engagement program is consistent and relevant and establishes the utility as a partner that SMB customers can to rely on.
As JD Power emphasized in their survey reporting, far too many business customers are not receiving proactive outreach from their utility today, and it’s incumbent upon utilities to change that reality and establish a stronger collaboration with their high-value commercial customers.
After all, that’s just good business.
If you would like to learn more about Rocky Mountain Power’s Business Energy Reports program and Bidgely’s SMB engagement and SMB CSAT capabilities, download the Bidgely SMB Solution Brief or check out our SMB Solutions page.
Hear more from PacifiCorp’s Barb Modi by watching the on-demand webinar: “Secrets of SMB Success: Rocky Mountain Power’s Award-Winning CX.”
