Utilities
Utility companies are entering into fairly unprecedented times. They are confronting escalating energy prices, sizable capex needs, a possible discontinuity between costs and the rate base, and new methods to manage demand through SmartGrid initiatives. In the short term, companies will be motivated to reduce revenue leakage – both theft and non-theft – to bridge the cost-rate discontinuity while they test both the technical feasibility and business performance of AMI pilots needed to manage demand. In the mid-term, utility companies will grapple with how best to implement SmartGrid to ensure an effective and efficient method to manage demand – with a heavy emphasis on peak loading.
As shown below, these strategies will have a profound impact on the volume of interval data that must be captured and managed by the business, as well as the volume of conditional logic that governs it. Dramatic increases in volume and conditional logic will severely strain the meter-to-cash process. The strain on meter-to-cash has little precedence in the utility industry, and must be addressed with new capabilities that provide extensible, robust analytics to ensure that AMI gains are not directly offset with meter-to-cash financial loss.
Lavastorm’s capabilities deliver best practices from the communications and media markets, are proven for large utility companies, and can deliver the robustness and granularity to support an extraordinary shift in the meter-to-cash process. Through our solutions, utility companies can both realize gains in the current environment and de-risk the operationalization of SmartGrid.
For utility companies, we offer 6 solutions that deploy automated controls at the atomic data level in order to deliver financial and operational value: