Massive Data Provide New Opprotunities

We will be the first to admit that we have vested interest in the utility DSM industry embracing use of massive amounts of actual energy consumption data - just the thought of being able to slice and dice such real-time data makes one drool! But, the availability of such data streams offer real and significant business advantages to the utility industry. Just consider the fact that the electric utilities alone report that they are spending about $5 billion this year on DSM programs and this is expected to grow about 40% each year. Any utility with a decent DSM portfolio typically spends about 3 - 5% of this budget on measurement and evaluation (M&V) activities. If the same utility were to tap into the torrent of consumption data from its smart meter / smart grid systems, it could save about $200 million a year today.

This is not a theoretical dream, but entirely doable with today's technology. Consider the recent report from McKinsey & Compan's Global Institute says that analyzing large data sets will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus. The report titled,  "Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity," says billions of dollars of savings and new opportunities fueled by the insights from running analytics on such data streams. Who are we to argue with the brainiacs from the world's leading consultancy?

More importantly, we can point to an example from the utility industry. We did a project couple of years ago where we developed a M&V automation module that took data from a DataStore we set up for a major utility client to generate close to real-time analysis of DR curtailments of over 80,000 customers. We combined the data about the devices' capabilities to deliver load reductions and kWh savings, house characteristics, details of the curtailments, real-time run data from the thermostats, weather data, etc to slice and dice the data to deliver clear analytics on what actually happened during each curtailment. The critical part here is that we would pick up the data each night after a curtailment event and have the complete analytics and reports delivered to the client the following morning. For the first time, the utility had a clear view of what was happening right after the event instead of waiting for a report about one year later. As a result, they could experiment with their curtailments to discover what worked best [2-degree setback vs. 4-degree setback, etc.], which customers produced the most load reductions consistently, who were more likely to override and many other valuable insights.

We believe much more is possible with the granular data available from the smart meters and it's time the utility industry jumped into it to get significant additional value from their smart meter and smart grid investments. Give us a call - we are ready and able to help!