In early 2013, E Source collected and analyzed substantial quantitative and qualitative 2011 data from 10 small and midsize business (SMB) efficiency programs. We focused on direct-install programs—new and old, basic and comprehensive, large and small—from across the US and Canada. Our benchmarking study reveals that, despite great variation among offerings, small business direct-install (SBDI) programs are worth the effort for administrators. Our study can also serve as a helpful resource for utilities interested in creating new programs or enhancing existing initiatives.

Since 2010, E Source has collected demand-side management (DSM) annual reports from across Canada and the US to benchmark the performance of DSM portfolios. The DSM Achievements and Expenditures series allows utilities to quickly compare the performance of their portfolio to that of their peers’ portfolios. It also offers a broad set of portfolio metrics that paint a more holistic picture of DSM efforts. The summary report—with numerous tables, charts, and comparisons—is accompanied by a downloadable Excel spreadsheet containing the complete data set.

Energy Vendor IQ, powered by E Source, is the source for utilities to simplify their vendor selection process. It contains in-depth profiles of vendors in the energy world, enabling users to ensure that they select the right vendor for the job by identifying vendors’ qualifications and credentials. Users can see vendors’ service category specialties and basic information, plus client lists, examples of work they’ve done, the regions they’ve worked in, and more to find the vendor best suited for their needs.

Early Days

Our IVR Design Center will give you the information you need to build and optimize your telephone customer contact channel.  You can access all of our benchmark studies, rankings, feature analyses, and additional resources to help your utility design highly functional and user-friendly interactive voice response systems (IVRs).

E Source recently released its fifth DSM Achievements and Expenditures benchmark. The report presents actual demand-side management (DSM) results from 55 North American electric and natural gas utilities, along with E Source analysis and identification of industry trends. Detailed data indicates which program administrators are reaching their energy-efficiency goals and how close they came to doing so within budget. It also shows which sectors are having the most success and reveals year-over-year trends in portfolio performance.

Customers’ expectations and technology needs are growing, so how do you meet their needs with a website? The E Source Review of North American Electric and Gas Company Residential Websites can help. Our review provides industry level and in-depth analysis on how well utilities are serving their residential customers via the website.

In this poster, we examine spending on evaluation through a multitude of lenses. The concepts covered here will help provide an understanding of the share of spending that evaluation accounts for within utilities’ demand-side management portfolios. We also display evaluation spend performance as compared to plan and show the variability of evaluation spending by program category and portfolio size. The underlying data includes actual expenditures from 62 utilities across all regions in the US from 2012 through 2014.

A growing number of US residential customers are installing solar panel systems at their home. Who are these customers and what’s motivating them? This infographic highlights findings from a recent survey of more than 32,000 US households conducted by E Source and The Nielsen Company to better understand residential customers’ energy use and their attitudes about solar panel systems. Learn more about this survey and how we analyze the data in the E Source Residential Customer Insights Center.

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