New England's Largest utility company, Eversource Energy, has found a way to make its customers happy by helping them optimize their energy usage in an easier way.
How you might ask? Well, Eversource has integrated data from about a dozen legacy systems to better understand how individual customers consume electricity and natural gas. They hope to start analyzing data from Internet-connected thermostats! YEAH I KNOW! CRAZY!
To get to where the company wants to be, the utility has correlated data across its meters, customer info systems, and third-party databases, among other sources. All that info is brought into a common processing area and standardized.
Eversource sees this collection of data as an explosion of real-time data, they see it as a way to collect and analyze more data from customers in order to improve services.
They face a couple of challenges though! To take full advantage of this requires the ability to connect back-end systems and correlate with information across the enterprise. Companies must also have the technology to continuously collect and analyze information coming from all those sources.
Even though there are some challenges with collecting all that data, according to Eversource about 100,000 individual consumers have registered since November and those consumers can view a dashboard that shows them a breakdown of their energy use and lets them compare their consumptions with similar homes. The dashboard also allows customers to confirm or correct information such as the number of people in their household.
I can relate to this because I always ask myself why there is an increase in my water and electricity bill. But if this dashboard is available to its consumers then I would know my consumption trend and be able to cut down on certain utilities or change to a more efficient heating system.
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