Local, Green, and Fair Snapshot: Meet Actual Energy
By Jelena Dragicevic, SBN Intern
Actual Energy takes a granular, scientific, and actionable approach to understanding a company’s energy usage, allowing customers to save money and help the planet by optimizing energy consumption. The energy industry has been dominated by large cap companies. The result: an industry with limited flexibility that has failed to incorporate new, renewable technologies in the past 10 years. As CEO Mark Finley states, “The retail energy industry is ripe for disruption.” This is where Actual Energy fits in, not only disrupting what has become a stagnating industry but paving the way for a more sustainable future through its own innovative, technologically advanced platform.
The pandemic gave Actual Energy more time to focus and perfect their systems and product offerings. At the forefront is their transparent, dynamic pricing that encourages customers to transition away from peak hours. As Chief Administrative Officer Jared Dworken explains, “Our competitors are really focused on a ‘set it and forget it’ model, trying to lock in long-term, fixed prices with their customers.” This disincentivizes customers from reacting to market pricing, causing a strain on the grid that is correlated with inefficient, polluting electricity generation. Simply put, Dworken states, “If you are on a fixed price product where every kilowatt hour of energy you use costs you the same, then you really have no incentive to try to shift your usage towards times of lower demand on the grid that are correlated with lower prices and lower carbon emissions.” Actual Energy helps customers understand that “not every kilowatt hour of energy is created equal, by tying economic incentives with sustainability incentives.”
Their hourly carbon reporting allows customers to precisely understand how their energy consumption relates to their emissions. Finding out a company’s carbon footprint can be a relatively easy calculation: kilowatt hours/year multiplied by the prevailing national or regional average of pounds of emitted carbon/kilowatt hour. The problem: this calculation lacks depth. Assuming total energy consumption stays the same, it is difficult to see a customer’s energy usage at any given time and what fuel mix was involved in producing that energy. Actual Energy instead takes a more granular approach, analyzing a customer’s kilowatt hours used in each hour of the year and matching it with the fuel mix at that time.
Thereafter, the options available to customers are plenty. They can shift energy consumption to off-peak hours, reaping the financial and sustainability benefits. Under a fixed price product, customers do not have as great of an incentive to use electricity during the times when renewables are online and prices are low. According to Dworken, it is because “a lot of the power you are using if you have renewables is at off-peak times; but if you pay for electricity at a fixed rate, the return on investments in behind-the-meter renewable solutions may not be as enticing.”
Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) are also available. Each state has varying Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) that mandate a certain amount of renewable electricity and fuel sources. Suppliers are required to buy RECs in order to ensure that their customers’ energy consumption meets those standards; of course, companies can purchase more RECs if they want to surpass their state’s RPS. Actual Energy can facilitate such transactions and give their customers a breakdown of their sources. Marketing and sustainability consultant Nancy Marshall explains that there is also a growing “local movement for renewable energy.” Clients are increasingly interested in purchasing electricity from a local or regional renewable energy source, and Actual Energy can work with customers to provide this geographic specificity.
Actual Energy is especially proud that their platform “allows customers to have transparent access to the market and to be able to make decisions about changing their behavior to improve their efficiency and renewable efforts - essentially putting all the power into the customers’ hands rather than the suppliers’ hands.” Director of Sales Rich Caprio says that ultimately the best part about being involved in Actual Energy has been “to educate the marketplace in a new way.” Indeed, Actual Energy provides a refreshing, innovative, sustainable, dynamic, interactive approach to the energy industry that is all the more necessary given our dire need for a greener present and future.
For more information, check out their website or contact Rich Caprio at rjcaprio@actualenergy.com.