Municipal governments need utility-customer data to fulfill their responsibilities in several respects:

• To reduce municipal operating costs, ultimately borne by taxpayers;
• To deliver municipal services effectively, including public safety, health, community and economic development, operation of comfortable and productive municipal facilities and other services impacted by availability, reliability and cost of utility services;
• To set, monitor, manage and report on goals for energy sources and uses, impacts and costs in municipal facilities and throughout the entire community.

Access to utility customer data today is hindered by customer privacy standards that have not kept up with needs or the capabilities of information systems. MI-MAUI supports development of comprehensive protocols that protect customer privacy, set clear standards for what data utilities may provide and to whom, and that help local governments achieve their policy, program delivery and fiscal objectives.

Utilities Need Clear and Consistent Standards and Processes for Providing Data

For their part, utilities may face hurdles in their attempts to respond to municipal data requests:

• The customer controls access to their own utility data, aside from data used for utility “primary purposes”. Standards clarifying how, and to whom, utilities in Michigan may provide customer data to third parties, such as local governments, are incomplete or unclear;
• Different governments ask for different data at different times. A reporting protocol that specifies what data should be reported, in what format and at what frequency, would establish uniformity that would be easier for both utilities and governments to manage and benefit from.

Municipalities Need Utility Data for Their Own Operations to Function Efficiently

Municipal governments are responsible to spend taxpayer funds as efficiently as practicable and to make municipal facilities efficient and comfortable for staff and the public.

When the government itself is the utility customer, there is no question that it has the right to control, access and manage its own utility data. Utilities in Michigan have made recent strides, using the Green Button standard, in how they provide data to customers, but functionality important to local governments has not yet been provided.

Online data-retrieval systems offered by DTE and Consumers Energy are of limited usefulness to local governments because:

• Data is organized by account numbers rather than meter locations. Because municipalities often operate campuses served by multiple meters, identification by location (or function, e.g. street lighting) is critical to analysis, management and reporting;
• Different accounts cannot be aggregated to facilitate bulk download, analysis and reporting. A large municipality, with hundreds of meters, would need to download each account individually before aggregating them.
• Data is not provided in a format compatible with EPA’s Portfolio Manager, which many local governments and other organizations use to track, analyze and report on energy topics.

Municipal Governments Need Third-Party Utility Customer Data to Deliver Vital Services

Municipalities offer various services and programs that can be improved with provision of accurate, timely and appropriately aggregated third-party utility-customer data, including:

• Information that may help local governments support and protect vulnerable residents, such as the number and locations of customers experiencing shutoffs, in delinquency, and those receiving billpay assistance or special billing arrangements.
• Comparative customer energy-use information, which can help municipal authorities better target energy-efficiency efforts where they are needed most. Similarly, data on cost, project type and expected financial and energy gains from utility-sponsored energy efficiency projects can help local governments better plan their own outreach, education and support efforts.
• Information on energy capacity and reliability performance, which can inform local community and economic development planning efforts, improve local emergency response and resiliency planning, and promote stronger cooperation between local authorities and utilities.
• Street lighting data: LED-conversion data can help local authorities track financial and energy savings; data on outages and response times can help authorities better track and report problems.
• Information about planned and completed gas- and electric-system distribution system work can be coordinated with, and reduce overall impacts of, local transportation and infrastructure projects, tree and vegetation management projects and more, and can give local governments input regarding where investments and improvements are most needed. Examples include tree trimming and vegetation management; undergrounding of wires and other projects requiring excavations; pole, wire and transformer replacements; substation improvements; demand reduction; fault isolation and other circuit improvements; etc.

Voluntary release of data by individual utility customers, per current privacy requirements, t is very cumbersome and suffers from self-selection bias. The only workable alternative is bundled data reported by the utilities. However, protocols are needed that balance privacy rights of individual utility customers with legitimate government needs for data sufficiently granular to be of value in program implementation. Protocols should establish what data can be provided, to whom, at what level of aggregation and frequency, and how that data may be used and shared.

Municipalities Need Utility Customer Data for Policy Making and Implementation

Municipalities are hotbeds of energy policy innovation, and need reliable utility-customer data to set their targets, track and report progress. Examples include:

• City-wide renewable energy, energy efficiency, carbon-reduction or climate impact goals;
• Policies encouraging deployment of distributed energy systems such as rooftop PV and energy storage systems, and customer participation in utility-provided voluntary green power programs;
• Policies encouraging adoption of electric vehicles and installation and use of EV chargers.

A Standard Reporting Protocol Will be Valuable to Both Local Governments and Utilities

When local governments identify a utility-data need, they may expend valuable time and effort formulating the data request, identifying how to fulfill it, and negotiating details of content and format with utilities. Rather than formulating ad-hoc information requests on various energy topics whenever the need arises, local governments can benefit from knowing what data they are entitled to and how to request it, that they will receive reliable, relevant data at regular intervals, and can build their program planning, analysis and reporting around that expectation. Regular provision of standardized data can also call local government attention to problems they may not have identified and can support benchmarking among local governments to help reduce costs and improve government services.

In many cases, local governments may not realize what data they can receive or how access to it can strengthen service delivery and advance policy goals. For example, periodic reports on service shutoffs, numbers of residents on billpayer assistance or low-income programs, and accounts in arrears may alert local authorities to low-income and vulnerable residents who might benefit from other government assistance programs. This scenario suggests that local governments ought to receive regular baseline reports on utility customer data without having to request it.

A data-reporting protocol should reduce administrative burdens and enhance program implementation for utilities, as well. By standardizing data-report content, format and frequency, utilities may reduce the costs of negotiating with and responding to ad-hoc local government data requests, and create greater cooperation and communication toward a closer partnership with local governments.