Dynamic Service and Pricing
Dynamic pricing refers to electricity services where customers are provided with time-differentiated rate and price signals that provide incentives for customers to modify their electricity use and behavior to their and the utility’s benefit. It’s one of the most valuable customer benefits enabled by an AMI system. Dynamic Service and Pricing is a basic building block of a smart grid system. To enable these services, the NES System based solutions utilize smart meters and associated infrastructure that provide customers with two-way communications, TOU metering, messaging capabilities, and detailed usage information.
Dynamic pricing makes the value and cost of energy use transparent to consumers, and it lets customers see when cost exceeds value. With dynamic service and pricing, utilities reduce their system’s peak usage and improve the optimization of their distribution network. The most common types of dynamic pricing are time-of-use (TOU), real-time, and critical peak.
Encouraged by energy conservation, demand response, and the large benefits associated with these applications, dynamic pricing is gaining more interest from utilities and customers.
Key Attributes of the NES System that Support Dynamic Services and Pricing
- Lets utilities offer flexible tariffs including TOU pricing, critical peak pricing, and real-time pricing.
- Two-way communications allow for pricing information to be transmitted to customers based on price changes each day and at timed intervals, determined by software at the enterprise level.
- Exception pricing as well as price changes associated with system emergency conditions enable peak period pricing.
- Every NES meter can operate as a multi-tariff meter:
- The meter supports four tariffs that are selected for different time periods within a day (midnight to midnight).
- The meter supports highly configurable day schedules (tier switches) for weekdays, Saturday, Sunday, and holidays, and the system season changes, holidays and daylight savings.