Utility Program
Enabling ecosystems and empowering customers
Reduce Emissions
For more than 30 years, utilities and their partners have designed and implemented customer programs to meet objectives from energy efficiency and demand response, to distributed generation, renewables and load shifting. These programs have provided advisory services, technical assistance, procurement and installation as well as performance and warranty services.
They have involved a wide range of technologies, from lighting and thermostats, to boilers and heat pumps. Today they include on-site renewable power generation, battery energy storage, electric vehicle chargers and more.
EV Adoption Rate
These programs provide a great opportunity for utilities to have a positive engagement with their customers, most of whom only engage once a month to pay their bill. The education component of these programs has always been critical to their success, and has never been more important that in today’s energy space.
So much of what customers are seeing today is new to them – heat pumps, solar, controls, EV chargers. And we are just at the beginning of the “prosumer” generation of utility customers, the interaction between customer-owned products and the grid will only increase in the years to come.
EV Charging Industry
Getting program design right is important to customer satisfaction and to meeting the objectives of these programs. Have we designed incentives in a way that allows us to acquire cost-effective energy efficiency resources?
And how can we guarantee it without scaring potential participants and service providers away? We have seen great success when regulators have given utilities opportunity for rewards, but tied it to actual performance and delivered results.
In the best cases, utilities in turn have created performance-based incentives which pass this opportunity and responsibility on to market participants, and we’ve seen companies respond with innovative business models.
What this looks like in the new territory of the energy space of today and tomorrow remains to be seen, but we know that applying lessons from a generation of customer program implementation will be critical to our collective success.