Integral Analytics
Precise Valuation Of Energy Efficiency

Providing safe, reliable and affordable power is critical. In tow with the usual suspects of reliability, risk, capacity shortages, price spikes and congested transmission among others, new dangers lurk in the shadows cast by the emerging smart grid, from distributed generation, storage, demand response and more. Conversely, significant opportunities are emerging at micro levels including electric vehicles, voltage optimization, more targeted EE and DR, and dynamic dispatching of loads which create greater cost savings and margin building opportunities. The only way to understand and capture this value, though, is through a more sophisticated set of IT centric planning and operational tools.

Analytical software and consulting firm, Integral Analytics (IA) is focused on this market with its related operational, planning and valuation solutions across most of the utility silos. IA’s thrust is in extracting value and cost savings from smart meter data, ensuring Smart Grid programs to be cost effective, and enabling utility managers to avoid risks and show the value of smart meter data.

“IA’s experts in engineering, statistics, software design, and operations research have developed a comprehensive suite of sophisticated planning and analysis tools that mitigate the daunting set of challenges faced by utility professionals and focus on integrating more sophisticated analytics across various utility silos taking into account many uncertainties in future loads, reliability, weather, and costs or prices, providing answers which are accurate and defensible in regulatory settings. “ says Dr. Tom Osterhus, CEO, Integral Analytics.

To combat increasing competitive threats from renewables, distributed generation, solar, energy efficiency revenue reductions and the increasing opportunity from margin enhancing electric vehicles, utilities now must sharpen their pencils to identify customers or technologies that are cost effective at a much more granular and sophisticated level. IA’s software provides this increased granularity by valuing margin impacts at the household level, appliance level and over 40 years of actual hourly weather history, which drives much of the utility’s risk and margin.

Demand Side Management Option Risk Evaluator (DSMore) is a powerful financial analysis tool designed to evaluate the costs, benefits, and risks of demand side management (DSM) programs and services. The power of DSMore lies in its ability to process millions of calculations within seconds, resulting in thousands of cost effective results that vary with weather and market prices.This tool can be run in batch on all smart meter data, leading to the creation of margin maps, risk projections and customer segmentation built from the bottom up. DRPricer assists demand response (DR) program designers determine the fair value of DR incentives. WindStore and GridStore show utilities how to obtain 2X to 5X more value by optimally arbitraging Smart Grid and storage solutions within ISO markets. XactFit is a new impact analysis service that allows IA to bring the price of econometric analytics down to a fraction of the normal cost, and can be embedded within IT infrastructure to provide near real time financial reporting on Smart Grid program effectiveness.

Most utilities still cling to traditional “top down” system operations where generation and transmission assets react to changing loads in real time. IA’s IDROP changes that paradigm by providing direct choreography of distributed loads and resources creating a virtual storage capability that levels demand without changing energy. IDROP can proactively predict loads, control their shapes, and manage demand in the same way as generation resources, but can be done from the demand side. This creates much more cost savings than normal DR.

“Accurate forecasting is fundamental to identifying where and when capacity infrastructure improvements are required to provide safe and reliable service to PG&E customers,” According to Manho Yeung, PG&E’s senior director for system planning and reliability, IA’s LoadSEER has helped PG&E determine the number of transformers and power lines that needed up gradation, helping PG&E use the latest tools ensuring capacity-related capital investments minimize costs to its customers.

With a clientele spread across 35 states in the U.S. and Canadian provinces, it is continued R&D at IA towards development of more integrative DSM methods and initiate, software as a service for smaller utilities.