iFactor’s Notifi Product in Action
The Agricultural Irrigation Load Control Service Rider (ILC program) is being offered by a large southern utility to meet the Arkansas Public Service Commission’s new rules for Conservation and Energy Efficiency Programs. Under the ILC program, the utility interrupts electric service to irrigation pumps for three hours a day during peak load hours. This helps reduce ‘peak load’, which is the amount of electricity required to serve all customers during the weekday periods of summer afternoons. 30% in savings in electricity bills will be available to customers who have signed up for this program.
In order to support the program, iFactor’s Notifi product was implemented for the utility. All the customer registration information for both ILC and non-ILC accounts is maintained by iFactor’s Notifi product (including details such as cell phone number for text messages) in addition to the mapping of this information to specific accounts and meters. The first time a customer’s ILC registration information is handed off to Notifi (a customer may have multiple pumps and multiple registrations), Notifi sends a text message to the customer’s handset requesting a confirmation. A customer’s ILC registrations in Notifi remain disabled until the conformation is received, ensuring full opt-in compliance.
Once the registration process is complete, the Notifi platform takes over, receiving the results from the ILC systems that are used to plan and process load control events. Notifi receives this information via web services, and the pending load curtailments are mapped to Notifi events. Each event is used to send alerts regarding pump cycle times and status updates to the right customers. Notifi records all of these customer communications for reporting and analysis, making sure a complete record of these important customer service transactions is kept.
Notifi provides an off the shelf tool to manage the subscription and processing logic for this solution, and interfaces to the backend systems with a set of web services tailored to utility data and systems. While the production system referenced here is only focused on a specific set of load control events, the Notifi system supports complex event processing for many types of transactions such as energy management, outage information, and billing and payment details. Each customer can select the events of interest to them, and can tailor the parameters on those events to ensure the data meets their needs. Notifi allows customers to manage this profile via a web site, the call center, or directly through text messages. When this flexibility is combined with support for multiple channels such as voice, text message, and email, Notifi provides a complete off the shelf solution which lets utilities communicate WHAT their customers want to know and deliver it WHERE their customers want to receive it.
Tags: Notifi
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