Expertise
Whole building benchmarking, industry experience and domain expertise, at work for your teams.
At Calico, we apply our expertise in a few key areas, from a whole building benchmarking application to utility systems integrator services. This range of focus allows us to bring a wide spectrum of value to customer initiatives, programs and, often, systems and processes across a utility’s organization.
Energy Efficiency Initiatives
When it comes to energy efficiency initiatives and programs within utilities, it’s all about the data. Data tells consumers what they’re using, when and even how — and that’s the kind of transparency that drives any solid energy efficiency undertaking. Before benchmarking mandates even existed in certain areas, Calico was helping architect and deploy a whole building benchmarking application for easy, fast data access and remittance to the EPA’s ENERGY STAR.
And as industry standards and data regulations have evolved, especially in relation to Green Button Connect, we’ve been on the front lines, helping utilities enable easy, egalitarian data access. We understand what it takes to make these initiatives work within utilities because our company grew up doing just that.
Commercial and Residential Distributed Resource Management
Whether a utility is building a program from the ground up, needs a trusted partner to help optimize existing processes or wants to leverage smart thermostat technology to their customer base, Calico brings years of experience in multiple dimensions of Commercial and Residential Distributed Resource Management.
Program design and lifecycle management (enrollment verification, hardware interfacing, event management, reporting, analysis and more), staffing, advice, communications, market knowledge, technology, engineering services, data and systems integration…whatever the need, it’s likely that Calico experts have relevant experience or technology. And if we’re not equipped to address your exact needs, we’ll direct your team to a trusted partner or vendor that can help.
Proof of Concept, Pilot and New Program Development
What goals does your organization need to achieve in five to ten years? What possibilities does your team want to make a reality? These are important questions for utilities in today’s world, and they beg some follow-ups: What technologies will you need? Processes? Data structures? To help build our customers build for the present and the future, Calico creates lab-ready pilots to demo future technologies for utilities.
A wide range of innovation happens within utilities, often led by demand response. In partnership with utility innovation groups like these, Calico serves as an engineering and consulting team, working on defining, designing and delivering proof of concepts, pilots and new programs. We provide support based entirely on customer needs, allowing utilities at any stage of innovation lab growth to leverage our advice, technical skills and data expertise.
Programs often succeed or fail at the data level. And that means that utilities need to surface, analyze, take action on and constantly audit the right data sets and sources to secure the future of important programs. With any DSM program, it takes a detailed look at enrollment data and a careful eye on data streams. In order to provide regulators with accurate information, post-event data needs to be pulled and analyzed.
When it comes to gathering data sets from advanced metering systems, many utilities struggle against two obstacles: access and speed. Calico employs rapid reporting methods to drastically reduces access time, even for a year’s worth of data, from days to minutes. We’ve done the backend work and have the database expertise required to pull the right data, and our experience team constantly checks for completeness, quality and potential errors. More than that, we deliver consumable formats, making it easy for different stakeholders to derive value from the data we pull.
Calico experts take raw data, packaging it so that external vendors, regulators, applications, internal teams or any approved stakeholder can consume it via organized displays. Whether the need is recurring or one-time, our experience across various technical interfaces means that Calico can flex to specific utility needs.
We also go beyond the typical characteristics of a systems integrator. Calico experts work with vendors and utilities to ensure that data is always handled efficiently and with integrity. Our team isn’t just checking boxes, we make sure vendors get the formats they need and that utilities are getting the most out of the relationship.