Spokane-based energy management company Ecova Inc. has launched a new cloud-based platform for its customers, called the Ecova Efficiency Platform, says Ted Schultz, senior vice president of utility solutions for the company. 

The platform, Schultz says, integrates energy program data and operational activities, as well as external data, to increase the efficiency of Ecova’s utility company customers.

“The platform enables us to provide integrated data analytics and real-time performance data, to let companies maximize energy savings and increase customer satisfaction,” he says. 

Schultz says the platform is part of Ecova’s overall service to its utility clients, and not a subscription-based service. 

“We get paid to deliver results to utilities,” he says. “We run large programs with a lot of aspects. This is part of it … so we may be doing a program around LED (light-emitting diodes) and working with the retailers and manufacturers, and in that process, we would launch the Ecova Efficiency Platform.”

As an example, Schultz says a utility company in the Northeast recently launched five residential and commercial energy programs on the platform. The company uses the platform for incentive processing, customer database management, trade ally management, and its online rebate application portal. The portal, Schultz says, enables customers to see quickly if they are eligible for a rebate on energy-efficient appliances. It also enables contractors to check whether a customer is eligible for a rebate. 

The online rebate portal also integrates directly with the company’s incentive processing engine through the Ecova platform, Schultz says.

“It resulted in about a 25 percent faster turnaround,” he says. He says that, as of last week, 55 percent of the company’s incentives were being processed through the platform. 

Similarly, the company recently used the platform to bring commercial distributors and customers together for a Midwest utility company, Schultz says, enabling distributors to go online and check if a customer is eligible for an incentive. 

“We’re able to have the distributor validate in real time that the customer they’re working with is a utility customer and eligible for an incentive,” he says. “In the past, the distributor would not have been in the process.”

Ecova also used the platform to integrate data for an LED retail lighting program for a utility customer in the Southwest, Schultz says.

“We used point-of-sale data and in-store market data to drive precise incentive amounts and products in specific regions,” he says. “It resulted in a 42 percent increase in kilowatt-hours savings.”   

The platform is an ongoing project for Ecova, Schultz says. 

“It’s still developing; it’s never done,” he says. “We’re continually adding capabilities.”

Schultz says Ecova sees the platform as a way to bring external stakeholders together in one place. 

“In order to get results, we’re really a facilitator of the (utility) marketplace,” he says. “It’s a fairly large marketplace that we have to enable and get them to participate in the process to get some results. For example, if you want to change something in your heating system, we aren’t the HVAC guys. We have to enable the HVAC person to understand there’s an opportunity.”

Ecova, which was previously a subsidiary of Spokane-based utility company Avista Corp., was sold last summer to Cofely USA Inc., a brand of French multinational utility company GDF Suez Energy Services, for $335 million. Ecova employs about 1,500 people, around half of whom are based in Spokane. The company first launched in the mid-1990s as Washington Water Power Energy Solutions, then later became Avista Advantage, then Advantage IQ Inc. before eventually becoming Ecova.