Online Hourly Loads and Energy Bills The one million+ record MAISY hourly loads databases are now available online for any zip code location in the US and a variety of Canadian locations . Specify a location, customer characteristics and electric utility and get day type or 8,760 hourly loads and monthly bills for a single customer or market segment. Monthly energy bills are also available.

Example of Different Load Shapes for Two Market Subsegments Within the Small Office Building Category Different business and dwelling unit types have characteristic hourly load profiles. However, focusing on aggregate load profiles of several dozen customer segments ignores the fact that the hourly load profile variation among customers within these customer categories is typically greater than variation across the categories. This relationship is illustrated in the charts below as well as the last chart presented in our article on large commercial customers where a significant portion of retail customers have average summer load factors comparable to grocery load factors even thought the average load factor of groceries is 41% greater than that of retail. The MAISY system permits users to select individual customers or customer segments based on dozens or even on hundreds of customer characteristics. Pick any combination of business type, floor space, operating schedules, space heating fuel, year of construction and many other variables to zero in on a specific customer type or market segment. What about other load-profiling systems that offer 12, 36 , 75 or some other limited number of fixed customer segments? To represent 13 commercial business types, three heating fuel types (electric, gas and oil ) and three customer sizes (small, medium and large ) requires 117 prototypes or "typical" buildings. Add in three age categories and more than 350 "fixed prototypes" would be required, well beyond the scope of these "fixed" systems. With MAISY, customer and segment selections provide hundreds of possible definitions with nearly unlimited choices of customer characteristics. Only MAISY provides the detail and flexibility required to reflect the extensive customer and segment detail required in competitive markets. Sources of load profile data which rely on fixed customer segments (e.g. large, medium and small offices) typically develop hourly load data with engineering models (e.g., DOE2) of a single "prototype" building. The aggregate nature of these representations misses the variation that exists among individual buildings within these segments, hiding important market information. For instance, a particular rate structure may provide an acceptable, competitive profit on an entire segment represented by one prototype load profile; however, analysis of subsets of the segment (which can be performed with MAISY but not with the "prototype or typical" load profile approach) may reveal significant diversity in profit levels across customer sub-segments such that some customers are provided power at a loss while profit margins on other customers result in cream-skimming targets for other suppliers. These limitations of traditional aggregate load shapes can easily be overcome with MAISY where users can see and evaluate the whole range of load shapes within each specific building type with just a few mouse clicks. For example, the chart below shows hourly loads for a sample of California office buildings on a July week day.

This traditional-looking summer load profile reveals only part of the picture because different subsets of this office market reflect very different load profiles. For instance, drilling down to compare load profiles in two size categories shows substantial differences in July week-day load profiles.

Offices with 25-50k Square Feet

Offices with 50-100k Square Feet

While the general load shapes appear similar, the difference in the peak-to-off-peak ratios between these two building sizes is substantial. The ratio of 3:00 pm loads to 1:00 am loads is 5 for the smaller buildings and closer to 3.5 for the larger buildings. Exploring the MAISY database reveals several reasons for these differences. The larger buildings are two times more likely to have lighting controls and three times more likely to have HVAC controls. The larger buildings also have longer operating hours and greater operation of HVAC and lighting systems in "after-hours" periods.

Comprehensive market analysis requires hourly load data for detailed market segments; furthermore, these segment definitions will be subject to change and frequent refinements. MAISY permits users to evaluate and immediately develop hourly load profiles for any market segment defined by the hundreds of customer variables in the MAISY databases.

Another example of the benefits of using customer based-data for market analysis is presented in the Energy Insights article Assessing Utility Market "Headroom": Pitfalls of Traditional Analysis.