Pricing and Demand Response Services
The practice is unique in its dedication to providing the industry with the full array of services required to design, get approval for, implement, and evaluate demand response programs and pricing plans. Its staff is comprised of experts, including economists, engineers and technology analysts, with over 100 years of experience promoting retail customer interests, managing multi-billion dollar rate bases, designing pricing plans to link wholesale and retail markets, and formulating public policies regarding market structure and operation.
Clients utilize this knowledge and these capabilities under a variety of arrangements:
- Retail Pricing Effectiveness Audit. EPACT 2005 underscores the need for all retailers to take a close look at how they price their retail services. UtiliPoint helps electricity retailers assess the extent to which their rates and pricing plans are responsive to their customers’ demands for choices in how they buy electricity, meet regulatory mandates and initiatives, and create linkages between wholesale and retail price formation that improve market and enterprise performance. This first-level assessment establishes performance in areas where pricing plays strategic, tactical and operational functions.
- Characterizing and quantifying price response potential. Recent studies demonstrate that customers respond differently to apparently similar pricing circumstances and price structures. UtiliPoint has unparalleled experience in quantifying how customers respond to price and identifying the key non-price drivers to price response. The practice staff combines the results of primary research with practical experience to assign a credible response intensity value to customer segments and individual customers attributable to the pricing design itself and account for the influence of factors like price topology (frequency and duration of elevated prices), non-compliance penalties, weather, on-site generation, and enabling technologies.
- Demand response valuation. To answer the question: “How much demand response is needed?”, it is first necessary to quantify the benefits that would result from alternative initiatives. UtiliPoint has pioneered the development of valuation methods and tools to quantify who gains, and how much, from load changes induced by demand response and pricing plans. Our Price FX model has been used by ISOs to satisfy stakeholders and FERC requirements to demonstrate the value of demand response programs they implement, by utilities and load serving entities to conduct program impact and valuation studies, and by state and federal agencies to estimate the value of price and demand response programs. UtiliPoint conducts comprehensive benefit/cost studies to quantify the expected level and value of price response given current customer circumstances and under enhanced conditions, and helps clients derive sensible and achievable goals for achieving and promoting demand response.
Market Design and Pricing
- Wholesale Markets Design and Restructuring
- Public Policy
- Demand Response Program Design and Evaluation
- Retail Product Design
- Regulatory strategy and testimony
- Cost of Service studies
- Product feasibility studies
Market Development and Evaluation
- Retail Product Program Implementation
- Market Research
- Marketing and Training
- Promotion and Communications
- Tariff and Load Profile Analysis
- Comprehensive Program Evaluation