Market Research

Determining How Your Customers Use Energy

Before you can influence demand, you need to understand how customers in your service territory use energy.

Specifically, what market segments do you serve? What appliances and equipment do they have? What segments and end uses contribute to energy use and peak demand? And, what conservation actions have your customers already taken?

The first step in market research is identifying what information you already have, what service territory specific data you need to gather and what information can be inferred from existing sources.

Once you've determined your information needs, you’ll need to decide on a method of data collection that is feasible given your utility’s budget and analysis capabilities.

Municipal utilities have a significant advantage in developing and implementing programs because you already know your customers fairly well, and understand something about how they use energy and what's important to them, so exhaustive market analysis may not be required.

Combining your market data with information on energy savings potential by end use will help you identify which energy efficiency measures to target.