A new paradigm for the relationship between power suppliers and users through EE services

With the new turn of power industry reform coming, there will be potentially fierce competitions of the power retail market by China's open policy. To keep leading position as usual, traditional power suppliers, like the distribution companies owned by the State Grid and Southern Grid, are seeking solutions to compete the retail market. This paper describes a new paradigm for the state owned traditional power suppliers to help them compete in the retail market, which includes several interactive service programs between the power suppliers and their users. Through the programs, power suppliers draw up agreements with customers to get their active participating commitments and the authorization of collecting and processing of power consumption data. Then power suppliers or the third value added service providers process and mine power usage data to profile a single user or its similar peers' power usage characteristics. Based on the profiles the programs provide the customers with services, such as energy efficiency (EE) monitoring, EE benchmarking, power-saving schemes, even direct control of the user's electrical appliances / equipment under a predefined rules. To help decision makers better understand the paradigm, this paper also introduces some best practices by the world leading utilities and third party service providers.