Monthly Archives: January 2018

Utilities Should Really Show Customers What They Do

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The electricity business is highly technical and customers do not understand what their utility is doing for them. This deserves more attention in plain words, and customer communications should not be limited to storms, grid problems and feel-good messages. Plain communication is especially important since the correlations of customer satisfaction with verifiable objective measures of service delivery (such as SAIDI and SAIFI) are very low! There is, however, very strong relationship between the customers’ overall assessment of reliability and their feelings about how the company manages to minimize the number and length of outages and provides accurate estimates of when power will be restored.[i]

Insight:
There is a strong relationship between customer satisfaction and
feelings about what the utility does to reduce outages and provide repair estimates, but
low correlation with actual measures of reliability.

Obviously, this implies that the utility must show what it does to manage outages.

Florida Power & Light (FPL) is a great example of this approach. FPL turns installing smart new devices to its network into local media events – adding an automated recloser to a line becomes newsworthy! The following 3 news clips illustrate FPL’s strategy:

During hurricane Matthew in September 2016, FPL initiated proactive and frequent communications to keep customers and key stakeholders informed, with unity of messages across all channels:[iii]

  • Multiple robocalls to ~3.4 million customers in advance of the storm.
  • Embedded reporters provided with open access to restoration effort.
  • Multiple press conferences (daily) at the FPL command center, in the field and at county EOC’s leveraged new satellite technology.
  • Use of Twitter, geo-targeted paid social media and Facebook Live highlighted challenges in hardest-hit areas reaching millions of customers.
  • Print, radio, TV and billboard advertising prior to, during and after the storm.
  • Daily email updates to employees.
  • Customer service kiosks in hardest hit areas.
  • Thank you letters to stakeholders after the storm.

Not surprisingly, FPL won the ReliabilityOne National Reliability Excellence Award in 2015 and 2016, and the Southeast Region award in 2017 (despite hurricane Irma in September 2017).[iv]

[i]         Assessing Residential Customer Satisfaction for Large Electric Utilities, Lea Kosnik et al., Department of Economics, University of Missouri—St. Louis, May 2014.

[ii]        See https://patch.com/florida/bradenton/fpl-announces-new-storm-hardening-plan-including-major-investments-enhance-electric-system-serving, retrieved 20171230.

[iii]        Grid Hardening & Hurricane Matthew, Ed DeVarona, Senior Director, Emergency Preparedness, Florida Power & Light, https://www.midwestreliability.org/MRODocuments/Hurricane%20Matthew%20Performance%20Presentation%20by%20Ed%20DeVarona%20to%20MRO%20BOD%2003162017.pdf, retrieved 20171230. .

[iv]       See http://www.paconsulting.com/newsroom/releases/we-energies-wins-national-reliabilityone-excellence-award-at-pa-consulting-groups-17th-annual-reliabilityone-awards-ceremony/, retrieved 20171230, for the 2017 awards.

Virtuous Cycle of Sun and Wind Power

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Solar power was once so costly it only made economic sense on a spaceship. As costs went down, volumes went up, driving costs further down, which drove volume further up, which drove costs further down… and so on. The spaceship has come down and has now landed on Earth — no wonder that this new reality seems alien to many. Close to earth, wind power is even larger than solar and follows a similar virtuous cyclone, albeit at a more moderate pace, and the latest purchase agreements show that it is still the cost leader (but barely).

Worldwide photovoltaic solar generation (in terawatt-hours) has increased tenfold since 2010, following an exponential growth curve (see the figure). Wind increased even more in absolute numbers, almost quadrupling since 2010.

While this growth in renewable capacity is impressive, it masks that renewables are still relatively small. Half of electricity generation worldwide is from coal, oil and natural gas, and another 10% is from nuclear[i]. The share of the electricity generation was in 2017 only about 4.4% for wind and 1.5% for solar. From a small base, those percentages are, however, increasing quite rapidly: in 2017, wind and solar gained almost 1% of the global share of electricity generation. With renewable now competitive with traditional utility-scale generation, growth will undoubtedly continue. But the important insight is this:

Solar and wind power are relatively small but already competitive with traditional generation, which will continue to fuel the virtuous cycle of higher volumes and lower costs for years to come, crowding traditional generation out of the market.

We haven’t yet seen the end of this story.

[i]         International Energy Agency, World energy Outlook 2017, New Policies Scenario, p.650.

Utilities Should Lead the Change

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I have worked in the telecom industry as head of marketing, in customer care and as a business consultant — I saw what happened there. More recently, I have also seen some of the best and the worst of stakeholder communications at electric utilities — including while I directed a large smart meter deployment, a very challenging activity for customer relationships. Beyond the obvious like using social media, online self-support, and efficient call center operations, There is one thing that electric utilities should do to improve their chances to maintain healthy customer relationships as the industry is transforming: lead the change.

“Someone’s going to cannibalize our business — it may as well be us. Someone’s going to eat our lunch. They’re lining up to do it.”

That was Alectra Utilities CEO, Brian Bentz, speaking at the Energy Storage North America in 2017.[i]

Utilities have a choice: lead change or have change done to them. The latter might hurt customer satisfaction more than the former.

Like telephone companies of the past, electric utilities could try to forestall the coming change, or even to reverse it, hoping to get back to the good old days. In fact, this is rather easy, as there is a lot of inertia built in a utility, often for good reasons: public and worker safety, lifelong employment culture, good-paying unionized jobs, prudency of the regulated investment process, long-lasting assets, highly customized equipment and systems, public procurement process, dividends to maintain for shareholders, etc. For utility executives, effecting change is never easy.

In the end, however, resisting change is futile. Customers are able to start bypassing utilities by installing solar panels and storage behind meters, keeping the utility connection as a last resort. It is just a matter of time before the economics become good enough for many industrial, commercial and residential customers, with or without net metering. Customers will do it, grudgingly, but they’ll do it. This will also leave fewer customers to pay for the grid, sending costs up and stranding assets, therefore increasing rates for customer unable to soften the blow by having their own generation, further antagonizing the public… A death spiral of customer satisfaction.

So, what should utilities do? Here are three examples of utilities that have embraced change and made it easy for their customers to adopt change:

  • Green Mountain Power (GMP) in Vermont helps customers go off the grid. Combining solar and battery storage, the Off-Grid package provides GMP customers with the option to generate and store clean power for their home that would otherwise come from the grid.  The Off-Grid package is customized for each customer and includes: an energy efficiency audit, solar array, battery storage, home automation controls, and a generator for backup. Customers pay a flat monthly fee for their energy.[ii]
  • GMP is also deploying up to 2,000 Tesla Powerwall batteries to homeowners. Homeowners who receive a Powerwall receive backup power to their home for US$15 a month or a US$1,500 one-time fee, which is significantly less expensive the US$7,000 cost of the device with the installation. In return, GMP uses the energy in the pack to support its grid, dispatching energy when it is needed most.[iii] Not surprisingly, results of a recent GMP customer satisfaction survey showed that customer satisfaction continues to rise.[iv]
  • ENMAX proposed to use performance-based regulation to the Alberta Utility Commission (AUC). The AUC set the regime in 2009. performance-based regulation has since then been expanded to other Alberta utilities. ENMAX stated that a number of efficiency improvements and cost-minimizing measures were realized as a result of its transition to a regulatory regime with stronger efficiency incentives. ENMAX indicated that it would not have undertaken these productivity initiatives under a traditional cost of service regulation.[v]
  • PG&E selected EDF Renewable Energy for behind-the-meter energy storage. The contract allows EDF RE to assist selected PG&E customers to lower their utility bills by reducing demand charges, maximizing consumption during off-peak hours, and collecting revenue from wholesale market participation. [vi]

References:

[i]         As reported by UtilityDIVE, https://www.utilitydive.com/news/alectra-utilities-ceo-someones-going-to-cannibalize-our-business-it-ma/504934/, accessed 20180102.

[ii]        See https://www.greenmountainpower.com/press/green-mountain-power-first-utility-help-customers-go-off-grid-new-product-offering/, retrieved 20171229.

[iii]        See https://www.tesla.com/blog/next-step-in-energy-storage-aggregation, retrieved 20171230.

[iv]       see https://www.greenmountainpower.com/press/green-mountain-power-survey-shows-customer-satisfaction-continues-rise/, retrieved 20171230

[v]        Performance Based Regulation, A Review of Design Options as Background for the Review of PBR for Hydro-Québec Distribution and Transmission Divisions, Elenchus Research Associates, Inc., January 2015, page A-25.

[vi]       See http://www.energystoragenetworks.com/pge-selects-edf-behind-meter-energy-storage-contract/, retrieved 20171230.