Energy Trends Archives - Page 6 of 7

Webinar: Financial Impact of Coronavirus on Small Businesses

The coronavirus pandemic is far from over. Businesses everywhere continue to deal with the economic fallout of the crisis even as some assistance and deferment programs come to an end. Small and medium business customers will continue to look to their energy utility throughout the winter for resources and support to survive the financial impact of coronavirus.

In Questline Digital’s Plugged In webinar, “Financial Impact of the Coronavirus on Small Businesses,” guest experts from the SBA and AEP Ohio discussed strategies for energy utilities to help SMB customers through the next phase of the crisis.

SMB customers fight to overcome COVID-19 challenges

Small business customers everywhere are feeling the stress and of the pandemic financially, mentally and emotionally. As numerous SMB owners fight to keep their dreams moving forward, others have locked their doors for what they hope is a temporary closure.

Andrea Roebker, regional communications director for the U.S. Small Business Administration, has held roundtable discussions throughout the Midwest listening to the concerns of small business owners. Through these meetings, Roebker has seen the stress of SMB owners firsthand, but she also says there is optimism as they push innovation in their businesses and remain encouraged by the possibility of future stimulus and financial aid.

Roebker’s team at the SBA takes information learned at these roundtables back to Washington, D.C., to advocate on behalf of SMB owners and their needs. She says working to save small businesses and their jobs is huge. “Small businesses are the economic engine of this country. They create two out of every three jobs.”

At its core, the SBA helps to start, grow or expand small businesses through federal taxpayer funding. The SBA not only helps to educate and guide small businesses with resources, but also helps entrepreneurs who typically would not be able to get funding through a bank. By guaranteeing loans, the SBA reduces the risk for commercial lenders.

Federal support for businesses continues

In the first months of the coronavirus outbreak, Congress passed the CARES Act and created two new programs designed to assist small businesses. The SBA launched these programs in the following weeks, which is an unusually quick turnaround for federal government decisions.

Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was designed to keep employees on SMB payrolls. This program allocated money to 5.2 million small businesses and nonprofits nationwide.
Economic Injury Disaster Loan Advance was patterned after the SBA’s existing Economic Injury Disaster Loan program. Typically, this emergency funding follows natural disasters like hurricanes or tornadoes; this is the first time in the SBA’s history that a disaster fell into the pandemic category.

Those programs ended on August 8, but the SBA still offers numerous ways to assist small businesses:

SBA Debt Relief program allows the SBA to make payments toward small business loans. The SBA has made several months of payments for those loans so small business owners can focus on other expenses, like paying their energy bills.
Traditional SBA-Backed Lending loan lowers the risk for banks and includes favorable terms for small businesses, allowing them to raise needed capital. Roebker noted that fiscal year 2020 is equal to fiscal year 2019 in level of lending. “Many would think small businesses wouldn’t be going after loans like this, but they are as a means to pivot or grow their businesses.”
No-Cost Business Advising helps small businesses get support and resources they need through resource partners across the nation, including helping entrepreneurs rewrite business plans or create a digital platform.

Connecting utility customers to SMB assistance

AEP Ohio and serves about 1.5 million customers, including several thousand small business customers. According to Katie Grayem, director of customer experience with AEP Ohio, “Our goal is really to have the trusted energy provider relationship with customers.” AEP Ohio’s pandemic response was designed to meet the needs of their customers and provide win-win opportunities for them to benefit from the utility’s services and programs. The goal was to help grow the communities they serve.

Through an educational and informative role, Grayem says the energy provider also helps customers understand available programs outside of AEP Ohio. “We were trying to stay really active to help customers reach their financial obligations to ‘keep the lights on,’ as they say,” Grayem said.

A multichannel messaging strategy was an effective way to reach AEP Ohio’s customers and empathize with them. The energy utility wanted to be proactive in telling customers with past due balances what the implications would be following the disconnect moratorium in Ohio.

AEP Ohio also shifted their calling center responses from a “pay us now” mentality to offering assistance in enrolling in payment programs. For the first time, the utility offered payment plan options for non-residential customers.

AEP Ohio leveraged various communications channels, including their Questline Digital eNewsletter, social media and a specific business assistance page on their website to offer payment plan options and energy savings tips. Their business call center also had a dedicated unit with specialized training on the PPP and CARES Act programs to offer further resources to customers.

Like Roebker, Grayem sees positive signs in the business owners who are benefiting from financial assistance programs. “Unlike our residential population, who seem to be most inclined to take longer payback periods,” she said, “our commercial customers really seemed to just want to try it out and I think that’s a sign of optimism.”

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Solar Chimneys: Clean and Cost-Effective Heating and Cooling

As we prepare for the big man in red to make his yearly appearance, his normal entryway for businesses is getting an upgrade. Solar chimneys are becoming a more common building design element to create comfortable environments inside.

What are solar chimneys?

Solar chimneys, also known as a thermosiphon or thermal chimneys, are “passive” conduits that harness environmental conditions to generate cool air within buildings and expel hot air, or vice versa. Comparably, many buildings use “active” energy consuming measures, which use complex building systems to create comfortable indoor conditions, such as boilers and chillers.

Solar chimneys are tall structures designed to face the sun with a dark, matte surface to absorb solar radiation. They use the same principle as a fireplace, where the heat naturally rises to the top of the chimney and cool air enters the bottom. In the case of solar chimneys, the sun is what causes the air to heat up and rise. This allows cooler air from below to be pulled into the chimney, warmed and vented. The process of rising hot air and entering cool air provides ventilation in the chimney and helps cool the building below.

However, solar chimneys can also be used to heat buildings when the weather turns cool. For this, the ventilation outlet at the top of the chimney, where the hot air normally exhausts, is closed and interior vents are opened, allowing the hot air back into the building.

The keys to solar chimney design

Solar chimneys are particularly effective when they are placed in an area where they can be directly hit by sunlight. Size matters too — they need to be tall and wide, but not too deep so that the surface areas that both absorb the sun and come in contact with the air inside the chimney is maximized. Solar chimneys can vary in design for maximum efficiency, including adding multiple chambers to increase the surface area or using materials that absorb the most heat, such as a black frame, tinted glass and insulated glazing.

Another important aspect of the design is how cool air gets funneled into the solar chimney. Two methods are typically used for this ventilation process. One option is to open windows on the lowest level of the building to capture cool air flowing through the building and send it the base of the chimney. Another option is to bury a pipe underground; the air in the pipe cools and eventually makes its way to the base of the chimney where it can be heated and released. The design one chooses is up to the capabilities of the building and cost.

The benefits of solar chimneys

There are numerous advantages to using a solar chimney to regulate the air inside buildings.

Solar chimneys have a smaller impact on the environment compared to traditional chimneys that emit smoke. Solar chimneys simply emit air, thus no pollution and no carbon dioxide emissions.
Solar chimneys are a cost-effective choice for a cooling and heating system compared to air conditioning or heating units. Plus, no electricity or gas is needed to power the chimney.
They are more reliable and easier to maintain than conventional units since they don’t require any actual mechanics. No power outages or breakdowns affect them — only sunlight. Since they don’t require fuels to operate, they also are easier to keep clean.

As business customers consider more cost-effective and eco-friendly options to heat and cool their buildings, solar chimneys are becoming a viable choice. As their energy utility, it’s important to be aware of this trending technology to assist your customers in their decision-making. Plus, with the holidays around the corner, Santa will certainly appreciate the latest innovation in chimney technology.

Educate your utility’s business customers about the latest energy trends and technologies with an eNewsletter from Questline Digital.

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What is Geoengineering?

Consumers are increasingly concerned about climate change, and many state regulators have set ambitious renewable energy goals for utilities. The planet’s temperature has been rising for decades, and even the Paris Climate Agreement targets a maximum 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit temperature rise in this century. However, some believe that cutting planet-warming emissions is not enough to stave off disaster. Thus, enters geoengineering.

Geoengineering is “the deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s natural systems to counteract climate change,” according to the University of Oxford. This is generally accomplished one of two ways:

Sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky, aka “carbon removal” or “direct air capture,” so the atmosphere will trap less heat.
Reflecting more sunlight away from the planet so less heat is absorbed in the first place.

The question remains: Do we utilize geoengineering to offset the negative effects of climate change? Read on to learn more about the different categories of geoengineering, as well as the implications of these environmental interventions.

Direct Air Capture

The oceans absorb a lot of CO2. David Keith, a Harvard University physicist, has developed a patented “negative emissions technology” using chemistry to remove carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere. In 1995, British researchers suggested fertilizing the oceans with iron to stimulate the growth of CO2-absorbing algae. Phytoplankton algae would soak up CO2 from the water and cause more to be absorbed from the atmosphere. There have been over a dozen major iron-fertilization experiments in the open ocean since 1990.

Reflecting Sunlight

Volcano eruptions have cooled the earth slightly in the past. Concern over “nuclear winter” had scientists studying solar geoengineering back in the 1940s and 1950s. More modern ideas include setting up sun shields in space and floating billions of white objects on the oceans to reflect sunlight.

Dispersing microscopic particles (typically sulphates) into the stratosphere by airplanes to scatter sunlight (4,000 to 10,000 flights a year) was an idea first proposed in 1965. To protect the arctic ice cap, scientists have conceived the idea of deploying tall ships to pump salt particles from the ocean into polar clouds.

Recent attempts at geoengineering

Russian scientists conducted a “stratospheric injection” experiment in 2009 and Harvard University and University of Washington scientists are separately planning their own similar experiments soon. There is a direct air capture (DAC) facility in Zurich, developed by the Swiss company Climeworks, that removes CO2 from the atmosphere using a sorbent filter. Waste heat from a local waste incineration plant drives the process.

Carbon Engineering, a Bill Gates-backed company, has been testing a liquid potassium carbonate sorbent DAC technology since 2015. Coca-Cola aims to use Global Thermostat’s DAC to source CO2 for its carbonated beverages.

A Center for Negative Carbon Emissions was founded in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University in 2014. Many utilities see Carbon Capture and Storage (CSS) as an opportunity to significantly lower emissions from carbon intensive generation assets. CSS is a proven technology, though not yet adopted at scale.

Issues and concerns with geoengineering

Possible downsides of geoengineering include damaging the protective ozone layer, altering global rainfall patterns, reducing crop growth and acidifying the oceans. The effects that algae blooms could have on the marine food web is unknown.

Other implementation issues to consider include:

Global (planet-scale) or local (ice sheets) operations?
Who would be in charge of such planetary endeavors?
How do you settle on a single global average temperature?
Is geoengineering playing “God”?
Scaling up experiments is risky. Can we go back if results are unacceptable?
Is the geoengineering risk greater than negative climate change effects?
Could a focus on geoengineering delay direct greenhouse gas emissions reductions?

Some say that we have been unintentionally geoengineering our climate for more than a century, so why not intentionally geoengineer it now? Others argue that blithely dumping another 40 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year is akin to government deficit spending. The attitude is, “Let future generations deal with it.”

Solar geoengineering is attractive because it is relatively inexpensive, works immediately and doesn’t require global cooperation for local projects. Alternatively, restoring forests, an effective “natural” climate solution, may be the path to follow. The World Resources Institute estimates that a degraded forest area twice the size of Canada is available for reforestation globally.

With the numerous options available today, it is apparent that more research needs to be done to determine if geoengineering is the right solution to combat climate change.

Virtual Power Plants: The Future of Energy Distribution

With the rise of renewable energy, the way that energy is distributed is changing. The traditional top-down method of energy distribution, from the utility to the customer, doesn’t always apply to energy from solar, wind and other renewable sources — some of which may be generated by customers themselves.

In these cases, where power flow is actually bidirectional, virtual power plants (VPPs) are becoming a more common distribution option.

What is a virtual power plant?

A virtual power plant is a network of decentralized generation sources, such as wind farms, solar arrays and combined heat and power units, that work in coordination with storage systems and flexible energy consumers.

While VPPs may take a variety of different forms, they all operate with one goal: to relieve demand on the grid. They do this by distributing the power generated by individual units during peak hours.

How does a virtual power plant work?

Virtual power plant participants are connected to a central control system that can boost or decrease energy output in real time. VPPs can provide demand response automatically, responding immediately to price signals, shifting commercial and residential loads, or aggregating other distributed energy resources.

All participants are monitored and controlled with a single system, which makes it easy to initiate these distribution adjustments. The system can also show real-time data consumption of each distributed energy resource (DER) on the grid.

VPPs are not the same as a microgrid, which has a confined boundary and can disconnect from the larger grid to create a power island. VPPs can cover much wider geography and can grow or shrink depending upon real-time market conditions.

The goal of a virtual power plant

Overall, the purpose of a virtual power plant is to connect and network DERs, demand response programs and storage systems in order to monitor, forecast, optimize and distribute their generation or consumption. Including these various DERs in one VPP means the data can be forecasted and analyzed as though it was a single power plant.

The VPP also allows energy utilities to separate the DERs by type and location so they can segment customers. By using segmentation to their advantage, energy utilities can determine what kind of value the VPPs bring to customers.

Energy utilities and virtual power plants

Virtual power plants allow energy utilities to better assess and correct demand response issues. For example, Green Mountain Power in Vermont created a VPP with 500 batteries in homes to address peak demand, yielding $500,000 in savings in one one-hour peak demand period.

In some states, there is growing conflict between energy utilities and third party DERs over who has “control” over the VPPs. For example, PPL Corporation in Pennsylvania is currently in a heated debate against a distributed resource aggregation service business, Sunrun, regarding management of the DERs and the regulations put upon solar customers. In other areas, such as California, New England and New York, “third-party companies have signed bilateral contracts with utilities whereby the company is in the driver’s seat for DER management and the utility is a customer instead of a competitor.” These agreements naturally take away the debate and competition for control.

Despite the growing popularity of virtual power plants, these conflicts demonstrate the need for uniform regulations regarding ownership. Still, the cost savings and environmental benefits for both energy utilities and customers prove VPPs will be useful as energy distribution continues to evolve. In addition, they help make renewable energy more readily available on the grid and provide solutions to demand response efforts.

The future of virtual power plants may be murky as the operations continue to evolve, but one thing is clear: this is the future of energy distribution.

Learn how a digital marketing strategy from Questline Digital can help your energy utility promote the benefits of demand response programs.

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Work from Home: The Impact on Energy Use

Due to the global coronavirus pandemic, more people are working from home than ever. In fact, 42% of the U.S. labor force now works from home full-time. What does this mean for your customers’ energy consumption?

According to CBS News, California residential energy use has risen 15% to 20% during the pandemic and New York energy use is up 4% to 7%.This is comparable to the International Energy Agency’s projections, noting that working from home could increase energy consumption by as much as 23%, “depending on regional differences in the average size of homes, heating or cooling needs and the efficiency of appliances.”

As customers spend more time working at home, they are using home office electronics throughout the day along with increased use of lighting, heating and cooling — even using kitchen appliances instead of the breakroom microwave at work. Of course, this all leads to an increase in home energy bills as well.

Payment options and efficiency advice for work-from-home customers

Questline Digital deployed more 72 million COVID-19-related messages on behalf of energy utilities during the initial months of the crisis. Those performance metrics painted a clear picture of the information customers wanted from their energy utilities.

Based on this insight, Questline Digital developed two key recommendations for connecting with work-from-home customers:

Provide useful energy efficiency advice so customers can take control of their bills.
Proactively communicate billing options to customers who are unfamiliar with assistance programs.

At the beginning of the crisis, email newsletters were the most reliable way to reach customers, as most utilities suspended program promotions and other non-essential communications. eNewsletters delivered record levels of engagement in March 2020, with a 37% average open rate — 65% higher than the same month the previous year. One of the most popular content topics throughout the spring was energy efficiency, especially saving energy in a home office.

When energy utilities resumed marketing campaigns in the late spring and early summer, energy efficiency and paperless billing campaigns were the top performers. Energy efficiency messages achieved a 26% average open rate, surpassing the benchmark rate by 11%.

There is a more worrying trend lurking in the shadows of the work-from-home surge: The economic shutdown caused by the pandemic has left 30 million Americans without jobs. Some dual-income households have even faced the prospect of losing income from one family member while another continues working from home, driving up energy costs. Many of these people are facing financial hardship for the first time and may not be familiar with your utility’s billing options and payment assistance programs.

A major investor-owned utility in the Southeast sent a payment reminder email to more than 86,000 customers early in the crisis. The message provided an option to make partial payments and linked to the utility’s COVID-19 resource page. The email experienced extraordinary engagement rates with a 41% open rate and 5,850 total clicks.

A permanent shift in home energy use

As many companies continue to allow employees to work from home, it is clear that work culture is changing. For example, Google employees are working from home until at least summer 2021 and Twitter staff can do so permanently. Even when the pandemic ends, a survey by the Harvard Business School found that one in six workers is projected to continue working from home at least two days a week.

Despite growing questions about a continued work from home future, it is apparent that this is just the beginning. Your energy utility needs to continue to prepare customers for the increased costs that come with their home office, whether through payment options or energy efficiency tips.

The future of our work-from-home world may be unknown, but what is known are the numerous ways your energy utility can help your residential and business customers. Be a trusted resource as customers continue to work through the struggles of a pandemic.

Learn how proactive communications like Questline Digital‘s Payment Assistance Campaign connect customers with billing options when they need help the most.

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