Salt River Project shares pricing choice takeaways with utilities

Fierce Smart Grid
June 20, 2020

By Barbara Vergetis Lundin

The Association for Demand Response & Smart Grid (ADS) has examined the impact of pricing choice on customer acceptance and adoption when they are offered time-differentiated and other types of pricing options.

Salt River Project (SRP) was integral to the research, as they have shared their takeaways for other utilities to learn from.

The lessons learned by SRP include:

• Make programs voluntary, easy and pleasant and offer an opt out program.
• Offer pricing programs that will develop daily habits and routines that fit customer schedules, and can be communicated visually.
• Offer prepay to everyone, resulting in cash flow benefits to all customers. Under no circumstances should you apply service charges.
• Ask questions specific to individual customers so they can choose the right program. Offer interactive tools for preliminary research, account-specific rate comparisons, and customer service support to allow customers to determine the best rate. The utility benefit is broad adoption and continued customer participation.

View the article here.