1 Getting Started
The Oracle Utilities Opower Weekly Engagement Cloud Service, Residential provides customers with weekly communications that help them understand their rate plans, and potentially save money and help alleviate stress on the grid. There are two main types of communications utility customers can receive:
- Weekly Engagement Reports
- Load Shifting Reports
Weekly Engagement Reports
Weekly Engagement Reports are email reports sent to customers every week to inform them of their energy usage patterns, trends, and projected energy costs. With these emails, customers can better understand how their actions correspond to their utility bills, get a preview of their bills, and get helpful insights on how to adjust their energy usage. Weekly Engagement Reports provide a modernized experience with bold colors, a varied layout, and data-driven insights targeted to specific customer attributes.
Customers can receive the standard Weekly Engagement Report email, or after their bill is ready, they can receive the Post Bill Report email that provides additional insights about energy costs or usage during the billing period. Customers can also be selected to receive Cost Tracker emails as a replacement for the standard Weekly Engagement Report email.
Additionally, you can include Electric Vehicle (EV) Load Shifting insights in your weekly and post-bill emails. For information about these insights, and how to include them in your emails, see EV Load Shifting Insights in Weekly Engagement Report Emails V3.
Load Shifting Reports
Load Shifting Reports are digital customer communications that deliver load shifting insights to customers. These insights educate them about how they are using electricity and provide them with recommendations on how to shift or reduce their electric use in order to save money and put less strain on the grid.
The Weekly Engagement Cloud Service, Residential includes the following load shifting features:
- TOU Load Shifting Report Emails: This feature focuses on helping customers understand how their time-of-use (TOU) electric rate plan works, providing personalized insights based on interval usage data to encourage shifting electricity use to lower-cost (off-peak) hours, and helping reduce electric bills. Utilities use TOU rate plans to recover their costs, integrate distributed energy resources, and create a more equitable grid.
- Non-TOU Load Shifting Report Emails: This feature focuses on helping customers who are not on a TOU electric plan shift their usage from high-demand times to low-demand times. These emails are digital messages sent through the email channel to inform customers about how they are using energy each week, and to educate them about how they can shift their usage and reduce strain on the grid.
Load Shifting communications vary as follows, based on the rate plan a customer has:
- TOU Customers: Customers on a TOU rate plan typically receive weekly TOU Load Shifting Report emails.
- Non-TOU Customers: Customers who are not on TOU electric plans can receive weekly Non-TOU Load Shifting Report emails.
By educating customers about their plans, these communications help customers reduce their spending and lower their monthly bills, while also helping utilities shift usage off of high-usage time periods.
What's Included
The following components are available in this service: