Modesto, California: Data Comeback 

Located in the Central Valley, Modesto, Calif. is home to more than 210,000 residents and 13,000 businesses. Modesto’s publicly owned utility company, Modesto Irrigation District (MID), serves industrial, commercial and residential customers throughout the city and beyond.   

MID provides electric and irrigation water services for its customers and treats, delivers and wholesales drinking water to the City of Modesto, always aiming to exceed their customers’ expectations by delivering the highest value of service at the lowest cost. As the largest municipal utility in the Central Valley, MID manages and gathers data from more than 125,000 AMI meters.  

The partnership between MID and the Automated Energy team began in 2019. MID reached out to AEI with an urgent need to reconnect their industrial customers’ meters back to MID’s meter-data receiver.  

AEI jumped right in, and within 30 days, AEI was tracking data for 100 of MID’s key accounts. Within a year, data was being pulled from several thousand meters, and now, all 125,000 meters in the service area are being tracked through AEI. AEI was able to rollout data collection and management faster than any other competitor, and this was only the beginning of AEI and MID’s partnership. 

The Problem: Bogged Down in Data Collection 

MID continued their partnership with AEI to help enhance efficient collection and exportation of customer data. Excellent customer service is core to who MID is, and they sought AEI’s expertise to provide MID customers with direct access to a variety of energy management tools and reports. 

Exporting customers’ data was time-consuming, taking two or three hours to export data for a single account. MID would frequently receive large data requests from key accounts with multiple meters while their team only had capacity to provide a small portion of the account’s data, significantly limiting the amount of information available to their customers. Because of their capacity and time limits, urgent data requests became a major challenge. 

The Solution: The Load Profiler 

With the implementation of AEI’s Load Profiler service, MID can access all meters from an account and aggregate their data with the click of a button, saving them days of work. MID’s Major Account Representative, Esme Alvarez said: 

“AEI’s tools have freed me up to be able to focus on other projects, and when data requests come in, I don’t have to worry about something taking hours to complete. It’s now only minutes to retrieve the data and I don’t have to spend any time formatting. If a customer wants data aggregated by days, by weeks, or by months – it takes just a click of a button with Automated Energy.”

Even more revolutionary for the MID team was the ability for their customers to sign onto the Load Profiler tool directly. Within the Load Profiler, MID’s industrial and commercial customers can access their “day behind data” themselves. Each day, customers can receive their data from the previous 24-hours and analyze their energy usage, enabling them to pinpoint spikes in usage and better understand their utility bill.  

In addition to the Load Profiler’s standard data capabilities, it is also fully customizable. When MID’s billing system was upgraded, multiple internal reports that many of their key accounts relied on each month became unavailable. Within a few weeks of their partnership, AEI mirrored these reports directly into the Load Profiler tool at no expense to MID. Now, customers can process these reports in Load Profiler without any assistance from MID, saving time and adding value for key customers. 

The Load Profiler was especially impactful for MID’s industrial accounts who, through the software, are now able to set up alerts and notifications. This means a customer can set up an alert for a certain demand threshold, and the very next day, analyze the data and determine the cause. This ultimately empowers customers to adjust their process to manage their usage. MID’s Major Account Representative, Craig Castro said:

“Many of our customers run very data-driven businesses and the Load Profiler’s insight into their data is a huge advantage for them.” 

The Extra Mile: Utility Manager Dashboard  

In addition to traditional AMI meter data collection, MID had another unique data management need. As solar energy becomes more widespread in California and across the nation, MID needed to understand how impactful of a role solar energy is playing in the overall energy landscape in their service area.  

With these needs in mind, AEI created an energy usage dashboard specifically for MID’s employees to internally sort through and understand customers’ solar usage data. This Modesto-tailored tool was dubbed the Utility Manager Dashboard by the utility and is now regularly used by MID to make informed decisions and better understand how energy is not only used in their community, but also how solar energy is generated in their community. 

The Takeaways: Customized to You 

Like MID, whatever your needs are, AEI can customize our products to meet your needs. The Load Profiler and other customizable tools save utility workers time and save their customers money with the ability to analyze their usage and adjust accordingly.  

AEI’s mission to provide great customer service products that will help save time, energy and money enabled and supported MID’s mission to provide reliable, electric service to their customers at the lowest cost possible for a prosperous and collaborative partnership.

“With a lot of other contractors, you get the feeling they’re looking to add on a new service so they can charge you a little bit more, whether you actually need it or not. I have never gotten that impression from Automated Energy. If they feel like there’s a product that can benefit the entire customer base, they are willing to jump in and do it. And that makes the entire service better for everyone, not just our organization but every single customer that uses the product.” – MID Major Account Representative, Craig Castro

AEI has solutions for municipal and investor-owned utilities, as well as commercial property owners interested in managing peak usage and energy rates in a variety of settings. If you are interested in how AEI can help you, please contact Automated Energy at automatedenergy.com.