Electricity Asset Management Plan 2019-2029
27 Vector Limited://
Our customers have told us, through our research, exactly what they want. And that is to understand them, inform them and empower them to take more control over their energy needs and preferences. Our customers want more visibility of what is happening in the physical world of electricity – through relevant and timely information that is easily accessible and delivered as a great experience via their preferred communication channel. Just as when you can see the real-time location of a taxi on your mobile phone, or shop online and track the progress of your parcel delivery, that increased service expectation is applied to us.
DELIVERING FOR OUR CUSTOMERS WITH URGENCY Our commitment to deliver for our customers with urgency means we have a responsibility to know them, understand when our relationship matters most to them, and deliver meaningful experiences that make a difference. Vector’s vision for the future puts customers’ needs at the centre of our asset management strategy. Investing in customer research, working harder to understand our customers problems and challenges, and then looking for creative yet sensible solutions is going to improve our ability to strike the best outcome. Right now, we know that energy technology is changing fast, which is making investment decisions more complex. In instances where investment in traditional infrastructure is not necessarily the best course of action – we have the option of introducing an alternative solution. We will continue to invest in traditional assets when we’re certain they will deliver the best outcome for that community. In other instances, we will first look to provide alternate solution options that deliver the required service in a more flexible manner. At the same time, electric cars, solar panels, batteries, home energy management systems, intelligent networks and other digital technologies are creating possibilities and choice for customers. The vision of a future where communities are more self-sufficient, resilient and decarbonised is one that is being embraced by customers from all corners. They may soon be feeding electricity from roof-top solar panels and their electric car battery into the network, becoming energy producers as well as consumers.
Ahmad Faruqui, Principal of the Brattle Group, is an internationally recognised authority on the design, evaluation and benchmarking of tariffs and has also designed experiments to model the impact of these tariffs and organised focus groups to study customer acceptance. Besides tariffs, his areas of expertise include demand response, energy efficiency, distributed energy resources, advanced metering infrastructure, plug-in electric vehicles, energy storage, inter-fuel substitution, combined heat and power, microgrids, and demand forecasting. He has worked for nearly 150 clients on five continents, including electric and gas utilities. He has reviewed several of our data analytics studies dealing with customer behaviour and considers they exceed what he has seen in other utilities in North America. They are yielding meaningful and rich insights about customer preferences organised by demographic and socio- economic characteristics. They are also quite revealing about how customers are using energy and interacting with the grid. The insights derived from the studies are being used by Vector to enhance the customer engagement experience.”
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