New Opower platform integrations and capabilities enable utilities to better serve customers, reduce carbon emissions, and support distribution network health
E SOURCE FORUM — Utilities today have an incredible opportunity to engage and serve their customers as leaders in a clean energy future. New energy resources like electric vehicles, solar, and smart home devices are making it more essential than ever for utilities to connect with an increasingly savvy customer base. Oracle Utilities Opower is empowering utilities to do exactly that with new capabilities and new integrations for innovating at utility scale.
With new combined solutions with EnergyHub, Powerley, and Agentis, as well as new Opower capabilities for EV and solar customer engagement, behavioral load shaping, and digital marketing automation, utilities can use Opower to rapidly expand the breadth and depth of their customer engagement initiatives and gain new levels of visibility into their grid operations.
“With an evolving customer base, utilities need an enterprise-grade platform that both continues to pump out innovative functionality and enables them to easily plug in new offerings to extend the value they can deliver to every customer,” said Scott Neuman, Opower group vice president at Oracle Utilities. “As a single platform, Opower is helping utilities bring customer engagement into their core business operations and deliver new customer-facing services that can enhance the relationship they have with their customers.”
Customer engagement has become fundamental to utility operations. Utilities need to be able to coordinate all their customer touchpoints and get a 360-degree view of every customer. To enable that, Oracle continues to enhance how Opower integrates with other utility systems and incorporates third-party applications, further enhancing the customer engagement system of record for customer operations and experience.
Expanding Ecosystem Accelerates Customer Value
Recent Opower collaborations with EnergyHub, Powerley and Agentis offer utilities:
- A broader portfolio to drive energy efficiency and peak demand savings. Opower’s residential behavioral programs have driven over 24 terawatt-hours in energy savings, considerably more than any other provider. By combining these behavioral programs with EnergyHub’s bring-your-own-device (BYOD) DER programs and Powerley’s smart home engagement solutions, Opower is helping utilities supercharge enrollment in device programs and create deeper, automated energy savings. And in partnership with Agentis, Opower now offers utilities the industry’s only verified behavioral energy savings for both residential and commercial customers.
- Effective behind-the-meter engagement at scale: The Opower platform creates personalized customer journeys across moments that matter, including peak days, high bills, smart meter roll-outs, and solar installations. Opower’s partners extend those journeys into the connected home. Powerley and Oracle have created a cohesive customer journey, tapping the potential of real-time energy data to help utility customers create smarter homes that uncover energy waste and deliver energy savings automation. EnergyHub and Oracle are also unlocking new value for utilities from connected utility customers by combining effective engagement, adoption, and orchestration of distributed energy resources (DERs), leveraging EnergyHub’s network of distributed energy resource providers and Opower’s millions of consumer touchpoints.
- A more complete customer experience: Oracle provides frictionless online transactions and a seamless web experience for all classes of customers, as well as deep energy and billing insights for residential customers. With Agentis, Oracle extends these insights to meet the unique needs of business customers. These personalized analytics and tools are proven to drive energy-saving actions among a utility’s commercial customers.
- Better visibility and control over Distributed Energy Resources (DERs): The proliferation of DERs is also driving the need for increased visibility not just across customer systems, but across grid management systems as well. The combination of EnergyHub’s Mercury DERMS and Oracle’s Network Management System provides distribution operators the ability to visualize and orchestrate grid-edge DERs, enabling integrated grid operations.
“Regulations, rate changes, the addition of new energy resources – utilities today are in the midst of a perfect storm of challenges that point solutions just can’t address. Only Oracle offers the end-to-end solutions to help utilities foster better, more valuable relationships with customers which, in turn, help the utilities drive down service costs and balance demand on the grid,” added Neuman.
Spanning more than 60 million households globally, Opower is the most widely used customer engagement platform of record in the utility industry.
Additional Resources
- Oracle Utilities Opower Behavioral Load Shaping Cloud Service
- Learn more about Oracle Utilities Opower
- Follow us on Twitter and the Oracle Utilities blog
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