Over the last century, the utility industry has become increasingly more effective at providing reliable, affordable energy to residents and businesses. The industry is now at a crossroad, driven by the push for de-carbonization, new technologies, and customer desire for more information and options regarding energy use.

With many more demands being placed on the grid, delivering reliable and affordable energy entails a new level of complexity. What’s more, we are increasingly being asked to provide “behind the meter” services to help customers optimize their energy use.

Innovating from the Outside

Regulators and policymakers in New England advocate for energy efficiency as the first fuel. To that end, Eversource invests over $500 million a year to help customers reduce their energy footprint. Over the last three years, we have saved the electricity equivalent of a 500 megawatt power plant, at a comparable cost of only three cents per kilowatt-hour.

Today, Greater Boston is in an unprecedented building boom. The Energy Use Intensity measure of the typical new building is less than half that of similar structures constructed just 10 years ago. These are quantum changes that have reshaped the regional energy ecosystem.

To achieve these dramatic results, Eversource invested in developing a deep understanding of how our customers use energy, what it means to them, their investment criteria and so on. Among our commercial and industrial customers, 2 percent account for 80 percent of total energy use. In contrast, 80 percent of our C&I customers account for only 6 percent of energy use.

Given these statistics, it is clear that how we engage our largest customers must be different from how we engage smaller ones. The opportunity for smaller “micro business” customers to reduce energy consumption is different from that of large customers. Their financial considerations and ability to invest in energy efficiency are different, as is their ability to follow projects through to completion.

Our segmentation efforts not only break down customers by size, but also by sector and building use type. For example, financial return considerations for customers in higher education, commercial real estate, life science/biotech or government/municipalities are each starkly different. Our customer engagement strategy, along with the offerings and financing tools we make available, are tightly correlated with our understanding of customers at a nuanced level. We are thus making the transition from a “programmatic” view to a customer-centric approach.

The housing stock in New England is among the oldest in the country. Roughly, 96 percent of single-family homes in Boston were built before insulation was required by code. It makes little sense to have the same offerings for homes built in 1801 as those built in 2001 (insulation was required by code starting in the 1970s).

It is equally imperative that we understand the motivations behind what leads homeowners to invest in energy efficiency. For example, is it about reducing costs, being “green”, and/or increasing warmth during the cold winter months?

To accomplish this, we consider our customers based on their opportunity to make changes to their energy use and their propensity or willingness to do so. These techniques have long-been used with consumer products and in other industries. To apply these to the energy field, we have invested in our own organization, bringing in talent from other industries to complement our deep industry expertise. The pedigree of our team today is necessarily very different from what it was six years ago.