Tools for Public Utilities
Public utilities play a crucial role in providing essential services to communities, and educating customers about their options is critical for promoting energy efficiency and cost savings. With the help of NExS, public utilities can develop calculators that empower customers to make informed decisions. For instance, NExS can be used to create calculators that compare time of use (TOU) rates versus standard residential rates. These calculators would allow customers to input their energy usage patterns and determine how much they could save by shifting their consumption to off-peak hours. By providing customers with personalized calculations and insights, public utilities can foster a greater understanding of energy consumption patterns and encourage more sustainable and economical choices.
Here is a great example calculator for educating customers about time of use rates and how to maximize savings. (The parameters used in this example were borrowed from publicly available data on the Carter-Craven EMC Time of Use Calculator and was used as a model for illustrative purposes only. Disclosure: CCEMC is not a current NExS customer.)
Below is the spreadsheet used to produce the calculator. It may be downloaded here.
Check out our how-to video here, then open the spreadsheet in Excel (or other spreadsheet editor, such as Google Sheets) and take a look at how it works:
The block of cells that the user sees (called the “view”) is the range Sheet1!A1:37. This is specified in the view definition section of the nexs.app worksheet.
The season selector in cell C1 is accomplished with a simple data validation list which switches between summer and winter rates.
The 0’s and 1’s in column A are rendered as checkboxes on the app to allow the user to select appliances to include in the “TOTAL PEAK kW” calculation. (See the checkbox line on the nexs.app worksheet.)
The “kWh slider” in cell B6 is used to control the monthly kWh usage value in cell D6. (See the slider definition on the nexs.app worksheet.)
The base, usage, and peak charges in the green “Your Estimated TOU Savings” box are calculated from the seasonal rate table at the upper right, along with the user inputs. If the time of use dates or rates change, updating the calculator is as simple as updating the rate table and re-uploading the spreadsheet to NExS.
Customer Examples
Rate calculators for customer education are popular with our utility clients. Additionally, some are using NExS to schedule on-premise energy audits and to provide specialized informative tools, such as incentive rate plans for EV owners. Here are a few interesting examples.
NC Clean Energy Technology Center
The NCCETC provides services to the businesses and citizens of North Carolina and beyond relating to the development and adoption of clean energy technologies. They chose the NExS platform to create a variety of rate comparison calculators for their partner utilities. Affordability, customizability and security were their key considerations in choosing NExS. See examples here.
Belmont Light
Belmont Light serves over 11,000 residential, commercial, and municipal customers in the town of Belmont, MA. They chose NExS to build a variety of usage and rate comparison calculators for their customers. A unique service built with NExS is their historical usage calculator which provides customer-specific historical usage to help them make personalized decisions on choosing a rate plan. The security features of NExS were critical in making this possible.
Wilson Energy
Wilson Energy is the fourth-largest municipal electric system in North Carolina with over 36,000 customers. They have employed NExS in variety of creative ways for customer education and for scheduling home energy audits. They’ve even created a suite of useful calculators that can be downloaded and installed directly on a phone or other mobile device. See examples here.
Ashburnham Municipal Light Plant
AMLP is a small public power utility in Ashburnham, MA. They recently revised their rate structure and needed a tool to help educate their customers about the new rates and how they compared with competing investor-owned utilities. To achieve this, they chose NExS to create an online calculator to allow users to see exactly how they could save with the new rate structure based on their rate class and monthly kWh usage. With NExS, their web design firm was able to exactly match the fonts, color scheme and responsive layout of the site easily within the Excel spreadsheet.