PowerCentsDC has successfully gone live with Mincom’s real-time, event-driven billing and demand response CRM software solution. Mincom’s smart billing solution supports the advanced smart meter project managed by Smart Meter Pilot Program (SMPPI), a non-profit corporation in Washington D.C.
Hosted by Mincom, the solution delivers demand response, time of use, critical peak and critical peak rebate pricing and daily billing information to residential customers in metropolitan D. using smart meters and smart thermostats provided by PowerCentDC under the program.
The PowerCentsDC project was delivered through a strategic alliance between selected vendors, industry groups and the Potomac Electric Power Company (Pepco). It is one of the first successful deployments of smart metering in conjunction with a wide array of residential demand response pricing plans. At go live, the program began providing immediate benefits to consumers in the District of Columbia by giving them greater control over their electricity usage and costs.
Through the implementation of the smart billing solution, residential customers are informed of their energy consumption via email, telephone or text messaging and are offered real-time and differential pricing so they can choose to use less power during peak periods.
Rick Morgan, chairman of SMPPI, said, “Mincom’s solution plays a key role in the project by enabling us to calculate monthly bills for our PowerCentsDC customers successfully and reliably using three different dynamic pricing options.”
The solution will also manage the participant recruitment and enrollment process for the demand response program.
Rick Morgan added, “Choosing this solution has also allowed us to avoid major CIS customization expenses. Keeping costs low is critical to the success of PowerCentsDC project.”
Mincom’s solution provides a unique combination of proprietary functionality to cover real-time, event-driven rating and billing, with the customer relationship management functions necessary to efficiently manage prospecting, promotions and enrollment in a residential demand response program. Further, it performs transaction management to provide real-time communications to customers for program alerts and critical peak pricing signals. The system is integrated with the local utility’s legacy mainframe CIS to maintain billing accuracy and business process continuity.
The rollout of the PowerCentsDC program demonstrates the ability of Mincom’s smart billing system to deliver a real-time, complex billing solution for a residential demand response application, while preserving the utility's investment in enterprise CIS.
