Cost Tracker

The Cost Tracker module is designed to help residential customers save more energy by showing them how their energy costs are tracking across the month.

Note: The Cost Tracker module is not included in Standard Weekly Energy Update emails.

Requirements and Limitations

This section lists the requirements and limitations.

Requirements

Same as listed in Requirements and Limitations.

Limitations

Same as listed in Requirements and Limitations.

User Experience

The Cost Tracker module is composed of the following:

Insight Statement: The current billing period projection is used to provide an insight statement of whether the user is projected to have a higher bill, lower bill, or spend about the same as compared to the same bill from last year. The time left until the end of the billing cycle is also provided.

Bar Chart: A bar chart comparison of energy costs for the current billing period and the same billing period from last year is displayed. The energy costs incurred so far in the billing cycle are provided along with a projection of energy costs at the end of the billing cycle.

The image below is an example of the Cost Tracker module for electricity customers.

User Experience Variations

The user experience varies for customers depending upon their service types, available data, costs, and locale. Note that the following list indicates the primary user experience variations, not all possible variations.

Gas-Only

For gas-only customers, the electricity unit “kWh” is replaced by “therms” or "CCFs" (whichever unit of measure is appropriate for the utility), and the word "electricity" is replaced by "gas".

Dual Fuel

Dual fuel customers see two graphs in the Cost Tracker, one for electricity usage and one for gas usage. The title is "Compared to last week".

Rates Not Modeled

If rates are not modeled or the utility has opted to not display cost information in this module, then energy use information is displayed in the comparison rather than cost information.

Calculations

The Cost Tracker insight is generated by displaying the customer’s energy use or costs for the week, a projection of what the customer is forecast to use by the end of the billing period, along with a bill or energy use from the same bill period last year. The customer’s current energy use information is collected through their AMI data. If the customer’s rate is available, the rate is multiplied by energy use to determine cost. Otherwise, energy use is displayed. The insight calculates the projected difference to alert the customer as to whether they are projected to use more energy, use less energy, or use about the same amount of energy.