PPL Electric Utilities—Spreading the Energy Efficiency Word Through Programs, Social Media
PPL Electric Utilities Corporation, a subsidiary of PPL Corporation, is offering its customers a wide variety of energy efficiency programs and activities to help them use electricity wisely. Based in Allentown, Pennsylvania, PPL Electric Utilities provides electricity delivery services to about 1.4 million customers in eastern and central Pennsylvania.
PPL Electric Utilities knows that energy efficiency is often about doing a lot of small things that can make a big difference. Many times, these are low-cost or no-cost things such as sealing drafts, replacing furnace filters or using compact fluorescent light bulbs. And through its E-power energy efficiency programs, PPL Electric Utilities is providing energy saving options like home energy audits, appliance recycling, and efficient equipment rebates for more and more of its customers.
Here are just a few examples of the innovative efficiency progams PPL Electric Utilities is offering:
- Through its “Think! Energy with E-power®” educational program, PPL Electric Utilities will reach about 19,000 elementary and middle school students this fall through interactive programs focusing on energy efficiency.
- With parent-teacher organizations in schools in low-income neighborhoods, PPL Electric Utilities launched a new program this year called the “Take Action at Home Community Forum”. Based on participation levels, students and their parents can help earn $400 to $1,000 for their school, in addition to learning how to take action to save energy and money at home. Forums were scheduled for about 20 schools and will continue through this month.
- And to help businesses reduce their energy use, PPL Electric Utilities launched the “Continuous Energy Improvement Program” in October 2010. The first group of seven participants, including PPL Electric Utilities service center buildings in Bethlehem and Lancaster, is expected to save 12 million kilowatt-hours of electricity through the end of this year. That’s equivalent to the carbon dioxide emissions from the annual electricity use of 1,032 homes.
- In addition, PPL Electric Utilities is featuring energy-saving tips at www.pplelectric.com/e-power, each day this month. Tips also can be found on the PPL Electric Utilities Twitter feed @pplelectric and on the utility’s Facebook page. And customers can continue to benefit from using PPL Electric Utilities’ Energy Analyzer, a tool that tracks energy use and provides timely information and tips.
Whether it’s teaching schoolchildren about energy use, helping income-eligible customers get critical energy efficiency upgrades at their homes, or helping companies establish new energy cultures, the end goal for PPL Electric Utilities is always to help their customers use energy wisely.
More information about PPL Electric Utilities is available at www.pplelectric.com.
PPL - Advanced Meter Project Returns Customer, Electric Company Benefits
PPL Electric Utilities Corporation, a subsidiary of PPL Corporation that provides electricity delivery services to about 1.4 million customers in Pennsylvania, has earned the Utility Planning Network's 2007 award for Best Metering Data Integration Initiative, which recognizes the use of electric meter data to benefit consumers. The company's efforts to install advanced metering technology will help homes and businesses better manage their electricity use, allow PPL Electric Utilities to provide new rate options to customers by 2010 and enable competitive suppliers to offer unique pricing options to our customers.
The key to those improvements is PPL Electric Utilities' addition of a meter data management system that enables the company to track, store and manage hourly electricity-use information from all of its automated meters. The new system, developed by Nexus Energy Software, was added in late 2006 and is the largest operational system of its kind in North America.
The company's customer service representatives are already using the detailed usage information to help customers better understand how they use energy and to answer questions or concerns about electricity bills. The company is also taking steps to give customers access to this detailed information through its Energy Analyzer on the Web. Today, customers can view daily usage information and up to two years of monthly usage history. The company's next steps are to provide hourly information in 2009.
The information will enable PPL Electric Utilities' customers to understand, like never before, how and when they use energy in their home. This knowledge will help them make better decisions about how to save energy and money. The information also will support new pricing initiatives, such as time-of-use rate options and energy conservation programs. The company's advanced metering system will also help it pinpoint outages so that its crews can restore power more quickly. And it enables the company to confirm when service has been restored.
The advanced metering project is part of PPL Electric Utilities' "e-power" initiative to help customers use electricity more wisely. The company is also evaluating a range of programs, including compact fluorescent light bulbs and programmable thermostats, to help customers save.
For more information about PPL Electric Utilities' energy efficiency activities, please visit http://www.pplelectric.com/.