White Papers

Voice Assistant Platforms: Pursuing an Improved Utility Customer Experience

The explosive growth of voice assistants cannot be ignored by any customer-centric company, and that includes utilities. Google recently announced the release of a Google Assistant developer program that energy companies can use as a platform for fruitful customer interactions. The platform streamlines Google Assistant integration for utilities and helps them improve the customer experience. This white paper offers examples from early adopters, such as Xcel Energy, and insights as to how energy providers can best leverage smart home technologies to offer customers a better experience when it comes to making energy decisions.

The Evolution of Distributed Energy Resources

In the words of Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, we will enter a time soon when we no longer make our morning toast with energy sent from a power plant hundreds of miles away. Peduto is describing an evolution toward a more decentralized power grid, a shifting away from electricity delivered via large central power plants and long transmission lines.

While energy industry insiders are well aware of these changes, many energy consumers are not. For those managing large energy budgets, such as commercial operations, industrial facilities, hospitals and universities, this can mean money left on the table. Microgrid Knowledge produced this report, sponsored by NRG Energy, Inc., to help these sectors understand the suite of new energy options.

2019 Trends in Utility Renewable Energy Financing

U.S. utilities of all sizes are now actively investing in lowest-cost energy options while also seeking low-carbon alternatives as states step up their clean energy mandates, with various states looking at 50 to 100 percent clean energy standards between now and 2050. Although the path for utilities to achieve scale in renewable investment varies, there are some interesting near-term issues that are relevant to a large swath of utilities.

In this white paper, CohnReznick and CohnReznick Capital experts dissect those issues, including the impact of build-transfer agreements, the challenges of third-party tax equity and the opportunity to better serve commercial & industrial clients in this shifting landscape.

2019 State of Demand-Side Energy Management in North America

The “2019 State of Demand-Side Energy Management in North America” is a market-by-market analysis of the issues and trends the experts at CPower feel organizations like yours need to know to make better decisions about your energy use and spend.

CPower has taken the pain out of painstaking detail, leaving a comprehensive but easy-to-understand bed of insights and ideas to help you make sense of demand-side energy’s quickly-evolving landscape.

Armed with that knowledge, your organization can leverage its existing energy assets so they can be optimized for savings and monetized for earnings.

How Corporations Can Embrace Distributed Energy Like Never Before

Distributed energy is an increasingly valuable player for any sustainable company that has a focus on integrating environmental and economic considerations into every aspect of the business, from supply chain management to workforce development to energy, to redefine business as usual.

Whether companies want to hit sustainability goals, manage risk or optimize assets for financial gain, the expanding use of DERs is creating significant opportunities to power business in new ways.

In this white paper, Centrica Business Solutions outlines how a mix of sophisticated partnerships across the energy landscape, along with innovative financing and technology collaboration, can unlock flexible energy solutions for businesses of all sizes to embrace energy management like never before.

Digital Electricity eBook: 6 Essential Grid Elements to Go Digital!

Utilities are leveraging digital technology with strong results, which is inspiring others to flip the switch on a digital grid.  Learn why utilities are deploying smart technologies on the distribution systems to improve grid performance and how utilities can begin the digital transformation through six essential grid elements.

Modernizing the grid to stabilize the integration of renewable energy

Are you integrating renewables into your digital grid?

We are on the brink of adopting renewable energy at a scale never seen before. To allow renewable power to meet its potential and continue its rapid development, we need long-term planning, investment at the right junctures, and smart grid management at scale. While the opportunities are significant, the challenges can also seem formidable.

Download this new white paper for a high-level look at available solutions to address these challenges and to enable the growing renewable generation investments needed to meet renewable portfolio standards and greenhouse gas reduction pathways.

4 DSM Strategies Your CCO Will Love

The service-centric wave has been building over the last few years, and now the customer is the heart of the utility world – your world. You realize the customer is the nucleus of the next-gen utility business model. And you know you need to get your customer more emotionally involved – with energy use and with your brand, too. But, you’ve got questions – namely the big one: How?

Demand-side management programs are a logical starting point for becoming your customers’ trusted energy advisor and moving beyond a transactional bill/pay relationship. You can, in fact, expand demand-side management (DSM) into a true customer engagement tool. So, here are four solid strategies to get you moving past the pondering-phase – across that crevasse and on to really reaching your bigger, broader, bolder customer goals.

U.S. Energy Storage Monitor

Delivered quarterly, the U.S. Energy Storage Monitor provides the industry’s only comprehensive research on energy storage markets, deployments, policies, regulations and financing in the U.S. These in-depth reports provide energy industry professionals, policymakers, government agencies and financiers with consistent, actionable insight into the burgeoning U.S. energy storage market.

The U.S. Energy Storage Monitor is offered quarterly in two versions– the executive summary and the full report. The executive summary is free, and provides a bird's eye view of the U.S. energy storage market and the trends shaping it. In contrast, the full report features state-by-state breakdowns and analysis on storage deployments, growth forecasts, policies helping or hindering growth, financing trends, and market strategies. It is available individually each quarter or as part of an annual subscription.

Data Analytics: Helping Utilities Identify Power Theft and Reduce Costs

Gone are the days of thieves simply trying to make a meter run backwards to not pay for the power they are using. With the growth of high-energy industries such as bitcoin mining and cannabis, electric utilities need sophisticated data analytics to find bad actors. In this paper, Honeywell discusses the power of data-driven insights and what to look for in an analytics solution.

Drones in Solar: Improve Your Operations with Aerial Intelligence

Drones provide quality inspection data across the solar lifecycle, from site selection, through construction and commissioning, to long-term maintenance. Drones have use-cases that improve safety and increase efficiency for residential, commercial, and utility-scale solar. This whitepaper will review the benefits of drones in solar, explore use-cases, and discuss the basics of managing a drone program. There are bonus appendixes to help with things like deciding when to outsource and developing an Air Operations Manual. This is a great, practical resource for anyone who is considering using drones for their solar operations or is currently using drones and would like to learn more.