REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., Dec. 11,
2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Baltimore Gas & Electric (BGE) has
launched a digital experience pilot for thousands of Baltimore residents who pay on and off peak
rates for electricity. BGE is using Oracle Utilities Opower
Behavioral Load Shaping Cloud Service to engage customers with a
proactive, personalized experience designed to help them save on
their utility bills. The new service encourages customers to
shift their biggest everyday energy loads, such as running
energy-intensive appliances and electric vehicle charging, to off
peak times. With these tips, BGE customers can save money while
helping reduce daily peak energy demand and supporting a cleaner,
healthier grid.
"We know on peak and off peak rates can seem complex, and we
have a responsibility to offer excellent service to customers who
choose them," commented Mark Case,
VP of regulatory policy and strategy at BGE. "With this new service
from Opower, we can deliver a better experience for these customers
by helping them shift their energy load for improved power
affordability and reliability, all while reducing emissions."
Learn more about the new Opower Behavioral Load Shaping Service
here.
Peak pricing programs have not traditionally provided the
ongoing, personalized outreach customers need to help them shift
their energy use and benefit from lower off-peak rates. Years of
public evaluation data show programs that offered some outreach
only left customers wanting more. With machine learning, user
experience design, and customer engagement automation, Opower is
reshaping this equation.
With Opower, BGE is providing residents new insight into how
small behavior changes can create significant bill savings.
Enrolled customers began receiving weekly digital communications
that help them understand how their on and off peak rates work.
Each customer receives continually evolving content like
week-over-week spending comparisons, personalized information about
their on and off peak spending, and adaptive, intelligent
recommendations for shifting their largest energy loads in order to
save money.
"On and off peak rates are nothing new—our industry has been
implementing them for decades. Program evaluators have found again
and again that customers with peak pricing are eager for better
insights into their energy usage and their bills," noted Dr.
Ahmad Faruqui, principal and energy
economist with The Brattle Group. "What's new and different is the
way in which enabling technologies boost customer awareness and
price responsiveness. BGE and Opower are putting those learnings
into practice and employing a smart experimental design that will
expand our industry's body of knowledge."
BGE and Opower are running the program as a randomized control
trial in order to yield novel, statistically significant
peak pricing pilot results. Throughout the trial, BGE and
Opower will be isolating and measuring the impact of the customer
experience itself—discretely from the peak price signal—on bill
savings, customer satisfaction, peak demand, and adoption of BGE
programs and products that can help customers save even more. The
trial started in Summer 2019.
Several additional utilities in the U.S. are running the Opower
Behavioral Load Shaping service this year. This is the fourth new
product released by Opower recently, in addition to hundreds
of new customer engagement features for utilities and their
customers. Opower is the world's most widely deployed utility
customer engagement platform, providing energy data analytics on
over two trillion meter reads and powering the utility customer
experience for more than 60 million households.
Additional Resources
- Oracle Utilities Opower Behavioral Load Shaping Cloud
Service
- Learn more about Oracle Utilities Opower
- Follow us on Twitter and the Oracle Utilities blog
About Oracle
The Oracle Cloud offers a complete suite of integrated applications
for Sales, Service, Marketing, Human Resources, Finance, Supply
Chain and Manufacturing, plus Highly Automated and Secure
Generation 2 Infrastructure featuring the Oracle Autonomous
Database. For more information about Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), please
visit us at www.oracle.com.
Trademarks
Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its
affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective
owners.
View original content to download
multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/baltimore-gas--electric-and-oracle-reshape-peak-pricing-programs-300972750.html
SOURCE Oracle