The growing popularity of rooftop solar and recent changes to net metering rules are making utilities rethink their approaches to residential rate design. See where they’re headed.

By participating in the 2024 E Source Utility Ad Awards Contest (as defined below) or otherwise submitting any print advertisements, ad copy, photographs, artwork, videos, commercials, or other materials (“Content”) through its contest Website located at energyadvision.esource.com (the “Site”), you agree to be bound by the terms and conditions of this Agreement as follows.

The E Source Forum is the premier conference for utility professionals. Our focus on program design and implementation, marketing and communications, customer experience, and energy-efficient technologies keeps you current on trends, best practices, and critical issues facing your customers.

Q:What is demand response (DR)? How do we explain its value, and how can we determine whether we should be doing DR at our utility?

Have you ever brought a new idea to your utility only to run into these responses?

• Our legacy system prevents us from doing that
• We tried that XXX years ago, and it didn’t work
• But we’ve always done it this way
• Regulators would never approve that

If these responses sound familiar, that’s because these are some of the barriers that your utility peers wrote on the Wall of Excuses at the most recent E Source E Design 2020 conference: Powering What’s Next for the New Energy Consumer.

Every new technology must cross the “chasm of death”—the high-risk, precommercial phase of market adoption where costs are high and value is uncertain—before it can take off and penetrate the market at scale. Utilities test and promote emerging technologies, but these efforts often only address technical and market potential, not market development.

Through E Source’s recent residential ethnographic research for “E Design 2020”, we identified discrepancies between the bills utilities send to their customers and the information customers want. Most bill redesigns focus on making it clear how much customers owe, reformatting for readability, adding elements of interest such as recent bill amounts and comparisons, and describing line items on the bill. But that’s not always enough.

Electric and gas utilities have significantly increased demand-side management (DSM) program spending in the past decade. Based on market data found in DSM Insights—our tool containing data on DSM program goals, budgets, spending, and savings from DSM regulatory filings—we’ll see DSM spending level off in 2020, with a number of notable pockets of big increases and decreases in spending, netting out in a slight decline.

The E Source Utility DER and Electrification Benchmark is an annual survey of US and Canadian utilities’ distributed energy resource (DER) strategy–related efforts. It’s intended to help our utility members develop more-effective and comprehensive DER strategies and tactics. Check out our infographic for some high-level results from the 2018 study.

At E Source Forum 2017, Todd Lazurca, manager of communication services at SaskPower, talked about blending analog and digital content to create experiences for customers. According to him, “experiences are the foundation of our lives—and they’re the foundation of the conversations that we have.” Those conversations have helped SaskPower generate word of mouth among its customers and encourage them to embrace shared experiences within their community. Lazurca explains: