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GoodCents Rate and Weather Products Are Utility Cost Savers Under the pressures of normal daily demands, your marketing staff may not be able to take the time or may not have the skills to develop special products that might give you an edge with your customers and your public service commission. Here are some products we’ve developed for utility clients on request and then made available to others. Rate Manager is a SAS®-based (Statistical Analysis System) software program that assists utility rate analysts in calculating, charting, and analyzing current electric service rates and designing new rates. Pricing and marketing analysts can also use Rate Manager to make competitive rate comparisons across companies and jurisdictions. The Rate Manager system runs on a Microsoft Windows operating system. The application has the Microsoft Windows advantages of a point and click environment with pull-down menus and ease of use for printing copies and graphics. Read more about the special capabilities of Rate Manager.
Electric utilities have to make decisions about what generation plants to turn on or off based upon anticipated usage by customers. Depending on the nature of the generation plants, it may take two or more days to bring the plant on-line or take it off-line. Generating too little power locally to meet customer demands may require the utility to buy power from other utilities on a short-term basis, usually at unfavorable rates. Generating too much power would be wasteful. Either too little or too much generation thus becomes a loss for the utility. As a result, weather forecasts have the potential to have economic impacts on utilities.
This Microsoft Windows SAS routine takes the three-month Climate Prediction Center’s NCEP temperature and precipitation forecasts and generates an hourly forecast for the three-month period. We search the historical record for the year that most closely matches the NCEP forecast criteria. This hourly data from the appropriate three-month period for that year is the hourly forecast for the future three-month period. The standard printer output contains graphs and tables of the data. Alternatively the data can be output to a SAS dataset, or as a Microsoft Excel file, a text file or as HTML.
This Microsoft Windows SAS routine requires the user to select an appropriate cooling and heating variable as input and the desired forecast year from one year in the future to five years in the future. The routine then iteratively calculates the best weather normal for predicting the input variables for the desired period. Normals are estimated from 1 to 30 years from a 40-year historical database to determine which normal predicts the desired future best. This routine produces printer output that consists of tables and graphs of the best normals.
This Microsoft Windows SAS routine requires the user to select an appropriate cooling and heating variable as input, and the routine develops monthly summary statistics for the selected variables for the 40-year historical period 1961-2000. The standard output is a text printer output. Alternatively, the data can be output to a SAS dataset, a Microsoft Excel file, a text file, or as HTML.
GoodCents is currently developing hourly forecast products that receive input from the suite of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) forecast products from 0–48 hours to 8–14 days and produce hourly weather forecasts for the user.
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