3min chapter

Climate Rising cover image

How OPower Uses Behavioral Science & AI to Reduce Energy Demand

Climate Rising

CHAPTER

The Value of Shaping the Peak to Avoid Investments and New Infrastructure

Time of use rates are financial incentives into the pricing plan that you and I might pay for energy. They encourage us to use less during those peak periods where the system is most constrained. Opower's new product called behavioral load shaving shows customers on a weekly basis, here's what you're using and spending during that peak period. And it points out the value of shaving the peak to avoid investments and new infrastructure simply by changing behavior.

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Speaker 2
And it points out the value of shaving the peak to avoid investments and new infrastructure simply by changing
Speaker 1
behavior. Exactly. There's another service that's becoming increasingly important in the industry as time of use rates become more prevalent. These are financial incentives into the pricing plan that you and I might pay for energy that encourages us to use less during those peak periods where the system is most constrained and the generation supply might be at its dirtiest. We created a new product a couple years ago called behavioral load shaving. And what it does is continually educate customers about how their pricing plan works. Because most again, most customers don't understand how this pricing plan works even if they select it. And it shows customers on a weekly basis, here's what you're using and spending during that peak period. Here's what appliances are costing you the most money. And here's what you can do to reduce your spending away from that peak period. Arizona Public Service is one utility that's been running that service for its customers for a few years. They found that overall customers receiving those weekly behavioral load shaving communications from Opower agreed that they were overall satisfied with Arizona Public Service at a 13% higher rate when customers who weren't. And just as powerfully, they saw a dramatic reduction in customers who were reporting that they were dissatisfied with Arizona Public Service. Over the course of one summer, they shifted 250 megawatt hours of energy use off the peak from a relatively small group of customers, about 40,000 customers. But we got our first look at how that product performs at scale and in extreme heat last summer. Like you may remember the heat wave that rolled through California last September. There's a large West Coast utility that had defaulted a large number of customers on the time of use rates just recently. And they deployed behavioral load shaving at scale to almost 800,000 customers. And they deployed it for the same reason that APS initially did. That helped customers just understand this pricing plan that they were being moved on to. But what they found was that customers getting that experience in total reduced their demand by 14 and a half megawatts every single day during the heat wave. So that showed us that this can be our valuable grid resource, especially as climate change creates more extreme heating patterns. And the system still needs to operate resiliency and reliability.

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