Energy Biz - March/April 2008 - (Page 57) politically inspired effort to obfuscate the obvious. As long as “demand response” is “voluntary” the public probably will put up with parts of it. However current trends in the industry indicate that utilities may not be able to generate enough electricity to meet demand within that 10-year window. Virtually all conventional forms of electric generation are under attack and are being blocked by global warming concerns. The number of coal-fired generating plants cancelled because of claims about the harm caused by CO2 emissions escalates each month. Coal generates 50 percent of the U.S. electric supply. If there isn’t a sufficient electricity supply – and federal government estimates indicate there won’t be – where is the shortfall going to be made up? Demand response, of course. The issue for utilities then becomes tracking who voluntarily reduced load, what incentives have to be paid and what adjustments must be made to bills. If demand response becomes mandatory at the residential level, then you can move the whole issue from customer care and billing to the more challenging task of customer relationship management. Utilities will also face the challenge of deploying smart technologies. Consumers may say, “You’re going to install what in my home so you can turn power off to which appliances when you want to?” They may also complain about time-of-day price changes. And they will probably resist buying a new television, refrigerator and toaster that can communicate with sophisticated devices placed in the home by their utility. To say billing and customer care for the vast majority of Americans is about to become more complex may be an understatement. Can existing billing and customer relationship management software handle it? The answer according to experts knowledgeable in the field is no. “The fact is that most systems are not going to be able to handle all this,” says Guerry Waters, vice president for strategy and marketing with Oracle Corp. “All this will require much greater granularity of data, more data through advanced metering infrastructure, and very complex calculations against that data. Most systems that are out there today at utilities can’t do that.” Waters points out another likely aspect of the CRM issue. If utilities – required by regulation and legislation to do it – are going to ask more of their residential consumers, those consumers are going to require more from them in terms of customer service. If some of those gadgets they were required to install to accomplish all this don’t work, they aren’t likely to be patient. When they don’t work correctly, the billing issues will get even more complex. About the only good news out of all this is for CIS vendors, which have been in something of a slump since the turn of the century. Many utilities still have legacy CIS systems that will be in no way capable of handling this brave new world. There likely will be a boom in CIS replacements – if utilities have any money left to spend after dealing with all their other problems. www.energycentral.com E n E rgyB i z 57 http://www.procoresolutions.com http://www.procoresolutions.com http://www.energycentral.com
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