Utility Analytics Institute’s 2013 Innovation Awards
The Utility Analytics Institute’s 2013 Innovation Awards recognize, honor and celebrate the industry’s most outstanding utility companies—leaders who are pioneering the future and accelerating the growth of utility analytics innovation and excellence. Learn more about this year's winners below.
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2012 Innovation Awards: Customer analytics award winner
Florida Power and Light (FPL)
Behavior model scoring to decrease costs and improve customer experience
FPL’s analytics project demonstrates the power of analytics to help utilities better understand and serve customers. The utility’s revenue recovery group is charged with ensuring that customers pay for the electrical service they receive. Using customer attributes that project an account’s non-payment propensity and provide a risk score for each customer, the group developed a customer behavior model that scores the likelihood of an account becoming seriously delinquent. The team derived the model by quantifying the relationships between customer behavior characteristics, payment history and other attributes. Statistical analysis studied a substantial sample of FPL customer records identifying key leading indicators that portray the customer’s likelihood to default. The score assists in prioritizing collection actions based on the risk of loss, such as which account to a field visit, contact via telephone or delay treatment. The behavior model score is a key contributor to FPL’s industry-leading performance in write-offs.
2012 Innovation Awards: Grid analytics award winner
Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD)
Integrating distribution automation & asset management
SMUD offers a great example of a utility that effectively blends smart grid with grid optimization and asset optimization analytics. SMUD is including grid analytics as part of a significant investment in digitizing and automating their grid. SMUD may not be focused directly on asset management with their smart grid efforts, but the data and analytics they're using for grid optimization and automation ultimately helps with asset management.
SMUD is laying the foundation for better analytics capabilities through their automation and smart grid investments. Examples include:
- In the case of a fault, quick analytics to tell the company whether SMUD can tie circuits together, and whether a circuit can take the additional load because of the a fault on another circuit.
- Another grid optimization area SMUD is focusing on is conservation voltage reduction by reducing substation voltages.
- Through smart meter voltage data, SMUD is able to identify areas that have voltage issues on the system and pass that along to asset management.
2012 Innovation Awards: Analytics business infrastructure award winner
Oklahoma Gas and Electric (OG&E)
Three-tiered analytics infrastructure
OGE’s efforts emphasize the importance of planning for the future with analytics. The utility has a three-tiered information architecture that includes a performance-based warehouse, expanded data integration and new analytical and presentation capabilities. The data warehouse is designed to expand to hundreds of terabytes of data by 2014. Data integration will incorporate real-time messaging in addition to traditional extract-transform-load, batch-based processes. Outputs are configured so that all analysts see a single version of the truth, a master data information web service that solves the dilemma of analysts using separate systems with variations of the truth.
Governance of analytics is an important item at OGE. The utility takes care to inform employees what tools should be used, how to use them and what's already been done, so the company can prevent people from reinventing the wheel.
