This webinar + article was originally published by SAP on YouTube and Medium
I sat with Berend Olde Rikkert, Chief Commercial Officer at NET2GRID (an SAP partner), and Jörg Ferchow, Chief Solution Manager at SAP, to discuss how energy suppliers and utilities can better leverage their smart meter data.
There is no doubt that we are facing a harder winter than ever before. We hear more reports on the news about low-income families in Europe that simply can’t afford to pay they energy bill. With the current uncertainty in the international geopolitical arena, combined with the changing climate due to global warming, such situations will only repeat themselves more and more.
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Smart meter data can actually be very valuable for energy suppliers and utilities in such times and can help them better adjust and expand their services. This is exactly why we partner with companies like NET2GRID. The NET2GRID solution will improve three capabilities:
Better customer experience, by giving insights to households about their energy consumption. NET2GRID delivers a white label app or an API which energy suppliers can integrate into their own energy app.
The second one is customer intelligence, by building profiles of customers and better knowing your customer. Thus, enabling energy retailers to give targeted advice and offers to their customers to become more energy efficient
Enabling better demand forecasting in their energy procurement and reduce imbalance costs by considering distributed energy resources like EV and Solar PV using disaggregated data.
“One example of that is the long-standing relationship that we have with E.ON in in Germany which are using our services,” says Berend Olde Rikkert, Chief Commercial Officer at NET2GRID. “Among other things, what we’ve seen in the past years is that it helped them to lower the churn and reduce the number of service calls because people become much more self-sufficient and know actually how they spend their energy.”
By integrating with SAP, NET2GRID allows SAP clients to integrate this data into their CRM systems, so agents have informed discussions with customers on how to lower their energy consumption. This could also be used to help them see what would be the next best action they can do to improve the energy efficiency in their home. One example is to detect if people are charging the car at home and if they have a special EV tariff, so utilities can offer that on the call if not already used. The same goes for installation of solar panels. Such information can also be used as a basis for campaigns and improved customer segmentation.
In addition to customer experience and marketing, smart meter data can also help utilities to achieve better forecasting. The traditional methods of forecasting are losing accuracy, mainly due to the increased use of distributed energy resources in the grid. Because NET2GRID performs data disaggregation and builds profiles of individual customers, they can stack them bottom up, considering the use of EV and Solar PV and thus boost the accuracy of the forecasting process.
These were just few examples of what energy suppliers and utilities can do with their smart meter data. Smart use of that data can really help utilities educate and activate their customers and support the upsell of various renewable services. Properly utilizing smart meter data can help them transfer from a commodity provider of electricity and gas to an energy services company, and finally, it influences the bottom line by improving the accuracy of your forecasting.
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