Carlisle, MA -- May 22, 2023 -- AEI will be resuming its free ISO Alert service to help subscribers avoid coincident peaks with the electric power grid during the coming months of warm weather and heavy demand. The service will resume on Monday, June 12th 19th, 2023 and continue through the last Friday in September.

New Peaks are Happening Daily

As usual for the start of the season, new 2023 peaks are happening on a routine basis on all 7 domestic systems we track, but it's very early in the season and most have barely passed 50% of their expected annual peak for this year. SMS alerts will only be sent when demands exceed a minimum floor we have set for each system in an effort to minimize annoying false positives. For your planning purposes, we are publishing the minimum floor levels that must be exceeded before we will issue any alerts that have a decent chance of being within striking distance of a recent annual peak. These levels are arbitrarily determined by taking 90% of the lowest peak load in the past 5 years. You can make this calculation for your ISO by looking at the five-year history for each ISO on our AEI ISO Alerts webpage.

As an example, The lowest 5-minute peak load for ISO New England in the past 5 years was 24,075 MW back on July 30, 2019. We calculate 90% of that load (21,669 MW) as the minimum threshold to be met before alerts are sent. Therefore, if ISO New England were to project a peak load of 21,169 MW on certain day, that would be about 500 MW lower than our projected minimum level for this season and no alerts will be issued on that day if their peak projected load is accurate. On some later day, if system loads exceed 21,669 MW, then our minimum floor level will have been reached and alerting will commence for the season. Alerts are issued by SMS text message in the hours before an anticipated new high for the year. In summary, the first alerts you see in the early part of the season are unlikely to be the final annual peak loads but it cannot hurt to use them to rehearse your DR protocols.

Customize Your Morning Report Delivery

With a new feature introduced in 2020, you are able to change the "Minimum Morning Report Rating" from "1" to "2 or higher" if you prefer not to hear from us on those days when the grid rating is a 1 out of 5. Statistically speaking, there will usually be less than 10 days during the next four months where a given grid will have a rating of 2 or higher. You can eliminate most of the morning reports by changing this setting from a "1" to "2 or higher". While we can never guarantee that a peak hour will not occur on a day rated 1 out of 5, it's never happened in the past seven years since we implemented our tracking system. If you are configured to receive SMS alerts, you will still get those if there is a sudden peak that was not forecast by the ISO. To change this setting, use the link at the bottom of any Morning Report email you receive going forward.

Capacity Charges

The good news again for this year is that capacity charges in New England continue to drop, down to $2.00 per kW-month this year versus $3.80 last year. This trend should show up as lower costs in your demand charges, and if they don't you really should let us look at your TOU profiles or put you in touch with our partners who can help on the supply side. For those of you in the PJM service area, RCP prices this year are also down to $34.13 (from $50, and down from $140 back in 2021/22) per mW-day, but just the same we continue to advise that you do whatever it takes to avoid coincident peaks because of variability across the different LDAs. Several sources are also predicting lower gas prices and lower electricity demand thanks to cooler temperatures over the coming weeks and into the cooling season. According to EIA, more of that reduced demand will be coming from natural gas and renewables. Even while demand appears to be softening, retail electricity costs will remain higher than before the pandemic.

For more information, or to signup for this free service, please visit the AEI ISO Alerts website at https://www.aeintelligence.com/products-and-services/aei-iso-alerts.

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May, 2020

Figure 1. Aggregate demand on seven U.S. grids during the months of March and April for 2017 through 2020. Lower demand is apparent on all grids except for ERCOT.

In an attempt to roughly gauge the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on electricity demand in the U.S., we looked at the self-reported loads across 7 major grids responsible for about 60% of U.S. electric power supply during the nine-week period from early March through early May. We found a weighted-average 5.8% decrease in demand for 2020 versus the same period in 2019. The drop represents a reduction of 23,372 gigawatt-hour (GWh) or, when annualized strictly on a calendar basis, a decrease of about 135 terawatt-hour (TWh) or 95.5 million metric tons of CO₂e.

In our methodology, we took the simple average of the 5-minute, 15-minute or hourly real-time loads for each ISO/RTO during a 9-week period starting on the first Sunday in March for the four years from 2017 to 2020. By starting with a specific day of the week, we forced the same ratio of weekday/weekend days for all four years. We did not account for weather, but a logical next step would be to normalize for total heating and cooling degree-days for each region some day when EIA has published the 2020 data. The data as shown in the table below the chart in Figure 1 is stated in gigawatt-hours after multiplying the average demand by the 1,512 hours of the 63-day period.

The largest percentage drops were found in the PJM and NYISO service areas. We are reluctant to speculate beyond what the data allows, but perhaps the fact that NY and NJ were earlier to the COVID-19 response came with a decrease in demand consistent with their longer lock-downs. Texas has been on a four-year upward trend and this year was no different – ERCOT was the only grid to show an increase between 2019 and 2020 and any effect due to the pandemic might have also been tempered by that state’s relatively late response.

Given the dire economic performance indicators associated with the pandemic, we were frankly expecting to see a more significant effect on the demand for electricity in the past two months when compared to previous years. The over/under in a small barroom bet had a difference of at least 10% (I lost). Certainly we figured that much of the shutdown commercial space would be somewhat offset by higher residential loads as non-essential workers stayed home, and we recognize that those commercial spaces still need to consume some amount of baseload even while dormant or unoccupied. But just a 5.8% decline overall?

PJM demand for March+April 2020 versus 2019

Figure 2. PJM average daily profiles for March and April 2019 (left) versus 2020 (right). The most notable features of the overall reduction of 8.8% are that the weekend and weekday profiles are more closely matched in 2020, and the slight surge during weekday startup hours is noticeably muted compared to 2019.

That led us to look anecdotally at what's happening in some of the buildings we watch. Boston Public Library at Copley – a big building at close to 1 million square feet – still moves from its setback load of about 650 kW to 1 megawatt every morning at 6am and remains there until around 9pm even though the BPL website shows this building as “closed until further notice”. This is a 930,000 ft² building that should be in an unoccupied state and yet it’s usage is up by 7.3% compared to the previous month before the shutdown and the profile difference is only 21.7% lower this year over last. We fully expect that the library is still occupied to some extent – perhaps taking advantage of the closure to do maintenance or project work that would be cumbersome during normal times, or to get ahead on a renovation that can safely be done during the shutdown.

Boston Copley Library usage for March+April 2020 versus 2019

Figure 3. Usage at Boston Copley Library for 1,512 hours in March and April 2019 (left) versus 2020 (right). The average daily profiles 2020 are markedly different but there’s still a daytime load of about 400 kW from 6am to 9pm, seven days a week above the nominal base load of just under 700 kW.

Smaller buildings are not immune. Several that we monitor have simply gone into night and weekend setback and for all we know they may have essential operations that are still up and running. For example, we expect to see normal load patterns in a town hall that also happens to house the police department. But a small school that normally peaks around 70 kW during a busy lunch hour probably doesn’t need to be at 30 kW 24/7 during a state-wide shutdown during the shoulder season.

We’re not trying to beat up on the buildings. The point is to try to understand whether a stopped economy is having any kind of meaningful effect on the grid – an effect that might manifest itself in new ways, and maybe some of those are positive? What does a grid peak hour even look like this summer? Do times like this signal a new respect for dispatchable energy sources or mark a permanent shift in the commercial/residential dynamic? Maybe a temporary 6% overall effect is not material to the grid as we know it for the long term, but it could be a significant factor in the supply and demand mix and how investors perceive any shift as a new and permanent state. Ideally, any reaction moves us forward on the sustainability and reliability spectrum.

We’ve heard that ASHRAE is recommending new ventilation requirements for buildings – like 100% outside air along with a warning against the use of demand control ventilation. That would seem to be a step forward in terms of occupant health but does come with an increase in the energy cost. For a similar but more discerned approach, Enel X also did a review of their own supply data and by knowing their customers as they do, they can better allocate the increases and decreases by economic sector.

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August, 2019

AEI ISO Alerts now include Top 10 Peak Hours history for most systems.

AEI has added a feature to its AEI ISO Alerts web page to better assist subscribers looking to avoid avoiding coincident peaks with the systems like PJM that use multiple peak hours when calculating their PLC or ICAP tags.

The tables of annual peak values below each chart on the main AEI ISO Alerts page now has clickable orange buttons for each year that expand an area to reveal two new tables.  The first of the two tables shows the Top 10 Peak Hours in the current year (starting on June 1st).  The second table is nearly the same except that any given day can only appear once in the table.  This is the PJM method for determining the "Top 5 Hours" in the year.  To be more exact, PJM normalizes for weather at the end of the year, but that's not applicable for our purposes during our mid-year reporting.

In the specific case of PJM, August 19th was a good example of why this new feature might be helpful.  The AEI ISO Alert morning report on that day rated it a low risk for PJM to hit a new annual peak hour. This was technically correct, but the peak load on that day did end up as the 5th highest load for the year so far (shown with green highlight in the accompanying image) even though it was almost 7% lower than the reigning annual peak. That 5th place load could have an effect on the ultimate coincident peak hour calculations that PJM will make at the end of the year because they use the Top 5 peak hours for their PLC calculation, unlike most other grid operators that only use the single peak hour.

AEI hopes that this new work will help its subscribers to better react to those borderline peaks that make their way into a PJM calculation.  Work is already underway to have these loads incorporated into the morning report so that customers will know with the appropriate urgency when a Top 5 or Top 10 peak is in the forecast.  AEI expects to have this variant of the morning report ready by early September.

Visit AEI ISO Alerts to learn more, to see the new Top 10 Peak Hours in action and to sign-up for this free service.

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June, 2019

A map of Independent System Operators, the governing authorities for electric power distribution in North America.

Extending its free and popular ISO Alerts service for the five largest regional grid operators in the USA, AEI recently added coverage for ERCOT serving the Texas market, Southwest Power Pool (SPP), National Grid ESO serving the UK and IESO serving Ontario, Canada. With the addition of these four grid operators, AEI now provides near real-time SMS and E-Mail alerts to customers covered by 7 of the 7 major ISOs and approximately 80% of the total power market in the U.S., the second largest operator in Canada, and the National Grid ESO for all of the UK.

AEI has built interfaces that connect to the web services of each ISO, retrieving their real-time loads and forecasts every 5 minutes. It then compares the current load and daily forecast to its database of historic load data for each ISO to determine if new peak conditions are imminent. When there is a significant risk of hitting a new peak load, users of the service receive a text message or e-mail to alert them of the condition 2 to 4 hours in advance of the approaching peak. The service includes the delivery of a Morning Report for each ISO that rates the probability of a new peak each day which takes into account the historic ability of each ISO to accurately forecast the day-ahead loads.

For customers on a utility rate tariff that has a demand component based on a facility's peak usage, this service is a zero-cost way for managers to avoid a coincident peak with the grid, thereby reducing their apparent load at the time the ISO declares the installed capacity hour for the year.

To learn more about the Independent System Operators in the U.S., visit the FERC website.

Visit AEI ISO Alerts to learn more and sign-up for this free service.

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August, 2017

A map of Independent System Operators, the governing authorities for electric power distribution in North America.

Extending its free and popular ISO Alerts service for ISO New England and NYISO, AEI recently added coverage for PJM, MISO and CA-ISO. With the addition of these three grid operators, AEI now provides near real-time SMS and E-Mail alerts to customers covered by 5 of the 7 major ISOs in the U.S., responsible for the delivery of electric power to nearly 65% of America. It plans to provide coverage for ERCOT and SWPP in the very near future.

AEI has built interfaces that connect to the web services of each ISO, retrieving their real-time loads and forecasts every 5 minutes. It then compares the current load and daily forecast to its database of historic load data for each ISO to determine if new peak conditions are imminent. When there is a significant risk of hitting a new peak load, users of the service receive a text message or e-mail to alert them of the condition 2 to 4 hours in advance of the approaching peak. The service includes the delivery of a Morning Report for each ISO that rates the probability of a new peak each day which takes into account the historic ability of each ISO to accurately forecast the day-ahead loads.

For customers on a utility rate tariff that has a demand component based on a facility's peak usage, this service is a zero-cost way for managers to avoid a coincident peak with the grid, thereby reducing their apparent load at the time the ISO declares the installed capacity hour for the year.

To learn more about the Independent System Operators in the U.S., visit the FERC website.

Visit AEI ISO Alerts to learn more and sign-up for this free service.

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July, 2017

AEI is pleased to have been selected as an Affiliate to the U.S. Department of Energy Better Communities^® Alliance. AEI is committed to provide its Energy Map^™ solutions to selected partners from a list of 40 noteworthy cities such as Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York and San Francisco.

In a presentation to 33 partner cities on July 12th, AEI joined with ACEEE, DNV/GL, Hatch, Philips and the U.S. Green Building Council to talk about our respective commitments to the Better Communities Alliance. For it's part in the initiative, AEI will be delivering its core Energy Map, Soft Start and ISO Alerts solutions to all buildings in a portfolio, with options for significant discounts on its Soft Start Real-Time metering solution. The first five selected partner cities will be receiving the Energy Map and Soft Start at zero cost for the first year of operation.

For U.S. DOE Partner cities, read more about the AEI Better Communities Alliance commitment.

For more information about the U.S. DOE Better Buildings Initiative and the Better Communities Alliance, visit betterbuildingsinitiative.energy.gov/bca.

Learn more about our AEI Energy Maps or contact us to schedule a 30 minute web conference specifically designed for you and your team.

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June, 2017

AEI has been selected as a Massachusetts Higher Education Consortium (MHEC) supplier to provide Facility Maintenance and Energy Assessment Software to MHEC members through June 2020. The letter from MHEC reads: "Your bid response was evaluated and determined to be the most responsible and responsive bid that offered best value to MHEC members".

As an approved vendor to MHEC, AEI is offering significant discounts on its entire product portfolio to higher education member facilities in Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Rhode Island. With this award, AEI will be able to design integrated and custom energy information solutions that deliver energy and water usage baselines and trending, time-of-use energy profiling, real-time metering, tracking of greenhouse gas emissions, and benchmarking to national standards. The design goal is always to deliver insight that yields energy savings opportunities with less than one year payback, and baselines and cost-to-operate models that support capital planning decisions for more extensive opportunities with decent payback.

With our novel low-cost approach to real-time metering, energy managers can monitor the building loads across an entire campus in real-time, positioning themselves for better response to peak demand conditions and other operational states where energy use is particularly acute or expensive. This includes text message and e-mail alerts when individual buildings are nearing billing period peak levels that can have significant negative effects on the monthly utility bill. Real-time metering also enables rolling profiles, quickly identifying wasted energy being consumed during unoccupied hours at individual buildings.

For more information, MHEC members can visit our MHEC Solutions web page or contact us to schedule a 30 minute web conference where we can walk through selected examples and discuss the specific options for your facilities.

To learn more about membership in the MHEC, interested institutions should visit the MHEC at www.mhec.net.

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March, 2017

This AEI Energy Map brings together a wide range of energy and property data from City of New York PLUTO, LL84 and NY ISO Real-Time feeds to offer an interactive way to inspect and compare utility usage at individual facilities and compare building classes to get a real sense of how 13,000 buildings covering 1.8 billion square feet are performing in terms of electricity, oil, gas, water and their resulting GHG effects.

Visit the Energy Map at www.aeintelligence.com/city-of-new-york.

AEI has delivered an Energy Map explorer that shows energy and water usage in the City of New York for over 13,000 buildings and 1.8 billion square feet across a wide range of builting types from office buildings to multi-family housing. The explorer is available online at www.aeintelligence.com/city-of-new-york.

AEI developed this visualization as a follow-on to its work building the City of Boston Energy Map to demonstrate that size matters. With a twenty-fold increase in the number of buildings in scope we can get a much more relevant picture of the energy footprint in a large city that deemphasizes artifacts in the reporting (municipal pools in Boston skew their results because of the small sample size), at the same time it improves the year-over-year progress reporting which is instrumental to achieving the City's 2025 and 2050 GHG reduction goals. With a broader and more accurate baseline, the effects of the cogeneration effort at NYU in reducing GHG emissions stands out all the more when the peer group is large.

For the individual building owner in the multi-family housing sector, is my high EUI compared to the other 8,000 buildings a reporting issue or should I be considering a significant renovation to make my rentals more competitive? With the high penetration of district steam in Midtown Manhattan, should city planners focus on this vital energy asset for infrastructure improvements or further leverage it because of its relatively low cost in terms of GHG emissions? As a Microgrid solutions provider, do clustered MFH buildings with a single owner offer an opportunity to improve their energy profiles and reduce their reliance on grid resources?

Questions like these are an inevitable part of the discussions that lead to more enlightened energy policies that have duly considered the trade-offs, costs, and political challenges associated with achieving the goals that are so easy to set when they are 30 years away. In the meantime, reporting mechanisms such as LL84 in New York, BERDO in Boston, and the increasing trend toward disclosure reporting requirements in hundreds of other cities and towns in the U.S. make the data more reliable and at least suggest the possibility for a common reference point for a wide range of constiuencies to use when asking such questions.

Our goal with an AEI Energy Map is quite simple. It's to assimilate your data sources - from annual utility reporting to real-time building interval data - and present them in a way that lets you ask and answer the questions that are important to you. From the portfolio level down to the individual building performance level. Rinse and repeat each reporting period so that you have measurable trends and feedback for your goals and achievements.

How does this help portfolio managers save energy?

• It's a comprehensive energy exploration tool is vital for understanding portfolio-wide usage and costs that can drive discussions with utilties, aggregators, facility managers and city planners,
• They can learn how their buildings stack up against the DOE and Energy Star national averages, by commodity, season and facility type,
• Ranking facilities by EUI, per square foot, and costs helps target resources to the energy efficiency opportunities with the best ROI,
• An Energy Map is a consistent entry point into facility details such as billing records, building automation system (BAS) data and analytics, utility interval data and peak demand analytics,
• With daily and weekly updates, it's an O&M view at the facility level that can help facility managers react to weather, occupancy and variables at the HVAC level,
• And there's support for widget integration with town websites can help drive awareness and social behavior at a high level, with trouble ticket support at the individual facility level.

For more information or to put your portfolio on an Energy Map, contact AEI.

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July, 2016

The Energy Map is an interactive explorer for energy and water use at over 450 facilities in the City of Boston. The Map brings together a wide range of energy data sources for a consolidated and consistent view of each facility, how it ranks compared to its peers, and its contribution to the total use in each of the departments in Boston. By integrating billing data and utility interval data, the Map is a logical entry point into the deeper insights of commodity use in each individual facility.

Visit the Energy Map at www.aeintelligence.com/city-of-boston.

AEI has delivered an Energy Map explorer that shows energy and water usage in the City of Boston for over 450 buildings and 15 million square feet in the Boston Public Schools, Fire Department, Police Department, Public Library and Public Works. The explorer is available online at www.aeintelligence.com/city-of-boston.

AEI developed this visualization as a demonstration of how it will deliver similar results for other cities, towns and property portfolios so that administrators and facility managers can comprehensively explore their energy usage.  

How does this help portfolio managers save energy?

• A comprehensive energy exploration tool is vital for understanding portfolio-wide usage and costs that can drive discussions with utilties, aggregators and facility managers.
• They can learn how their buildings stack up against the DOE and Energy Star national averages, by commodity, season and facility type.
• Ranking facilities by EUI, per square foot, and costs helps target resources to the energy efficiency opportunities with the best ROI.
• The Energy Map is a consistent entry point into facility details such as billing records, building automation system (BAS) data and analytics, utility interval data and peak demand analytics.
• With daily and weekly updates, it's an O&M view at the facility level that can help facility managers react to weather, occupancy and variables at the HVAC level.
• Support for widget integration with town websites can help drive awareness and social behavior at a high level, with trouble ticket support at the individual facility level.

Who's using it today?

Working with its partner Guardian Energy Management Solutions, AEI is developing this model for the specific towns covered by recently awarded Green Communities funding. Compatability with a wide range of data sources including Green Button, MEI, EPO and building automation system data from Siemens, Honeywell, JCI, SkySpark and many others makes it easy to deploy for other towns, campuses and large property portfolios.

June, 2016

This chart shows Boston's City Hall electric demand (y-axis, in kW) versus the ISO New England regional demand (x-axis, in MW) for the months of July and August 2014.

While the facility doesn't have perfect load correlation with ISO-NE or weather, it does track closely enough to warrant some demand response on those days where the grid will pass 23,000MW.  

Pushing the facility load down to its 95th percentile during a 5 hour period on July 2, 2014 would have reduced City Hall's ICAP tag for FY16 by about 10% and would have saved at least $8,000 in demand charges in just July and August 2014 alone.

Demand Charges and Your Utility - What's Happening?

With the dog days of summer well underway, it's most likely that the ISO New England electrical grid will hit its annual peak demand hour sometime in the coming weeks. A facility's coincident load at the time of the ISO-NE peak is used to determine its installed capacity "ICAP" tag, and that in turn is used to calculate the capacity charge for the facility's FY18 electric utility bills.  The rates per peak kW have been set and are non-negotiable: $3.43 last year; $6.66 this year, and moving to $15.00 next year and $9.55 in FY19. For facilities on a time-of-use electric utility rate such as the Eversource B3 or National Grid G-3 schedules, demand charges based on peak usage can amount to more than 50% of the monthly electric bill depending on its commodity supplier contract. And even if you are in a multi-year contract that features price protection against these increases, some contracts will discount your rate if you are able to reduce your peak demand.

The Challenge

If your facility's load profile tends to track with the ISO load curve, you probably already have some demand response protocols in effect and already get real-time alerts from ISO.  And you already know the effect on your utility bill or your commodity contract.  If these are foreign concepts, your July 2016 electric bill may show a painful surprise, and your July 2017 bill could easily be far worse.  But it's not too late to:

• Learn your facility's daily, weekly and seasonal load profile from your EPO data.
• Understand the individual components of your utiity rate schedule and commodity agreement.
• Get ISO alerts from ISO itself, MAPC, or a new free AEI ISO Alerts service that will send you SMS messages or email when peaks are imminent.
• Develop a DR plan for those days when load shedding can have the greatest impact on your monthly electric utility bills.

To put it bluntly, doing nothing is highly unlikely to be the best option for avoiding significant increases in your electric bills over the next several years!

Planning Ahead

Given these escalating and non-negotiable rate increases or, conversely, the opportunity to get a discount by reducing your ICAP tag, the urgency for this summer is to be on alert for probable ISO-NE peak hours and have a demand response plan in effect for those times. The ICAP tag assigned to a facility during this summer is used in the calculation of demand charges for next year's bills.

Once the "peak hour" urgency passes, there is still a substantial opportunity for savings each month by knowing a facility's occupied weekday profile so that monthly peaks can be can be avoided. For a facility with a 1MW average load, it's not unusual to see peak usage that is 3x or 5x the average. It is very reasonable to see a facility reduce their monthly peak by 5% - say 200kW - and save over $5,000 on a single monthly bill.

Contact AEI for a quick review of your utility bills and to be notified when we see a high probability of ISO-NE hitting its annual peak hour. The grid has already passed within 1% of last year's annual peak when it broke through the 24,000MW level back on July 22th in the 5pm hour thanks to an afternoon of temperatures above 90°F. With peak hours trending toward the later parts of the day, minimizing a facility's ICAP tag doesn't necessarily have to come at the expense of building comfort.

Once you understand the components of your electric bill and the opportunities for lowering those costs associated with demand charges, AEI can help you with the next logical steps. We'll profile the facility's average week, average day, examine its response to weather by season and degree-days. We'll look at night and weekend setback as well as its behavior under varying occupancy levels and can even infer a building's base load as a reference point for other less obvious opportunities. And if you're sub-metering the facility we can guide you on your demand response options when we know the individual circuit loads serving the facility. Reducing your peak demand during the ISO peak demand hour is like a big birthday gift, but reducing peak demand every month is the gift that keeps on giving and can easily exceed the annual value of a reduced ICAP tag.