Hey everybody!
I wanted to share a tip on getting electricity data from your smaller vendors. If you have a large number of small electric vendors, you can get bill data directly from your clients instead of from the utilities.
In Tennessee, we have many small electric vendors. So, if we only requested data from the ten largest, we would only have information on a small number of households and they would be concentrated in Memphis, Nashville, and Knoxville, where the bigger vendors are.
Even if we had enough data to meet reporting requirements, we’d have no way to tell if electric costs were different at the rural vendors than at the bigger urban ones. Going beyond the top ten vendors, we couldn’t get much rural data from utilities because we couldn’t get agreements to get consistent data from every electric vendor. There are just too many.
So instead of trying to get data from every vendor, we ask clients to supply the information to us as part of their application.
Clients haven’t been having too hard of a time getting that information, and it’s been easy for our intake staff to help clients get their bills because so many of our clients have electric heat anyway. I hope this helps!
If you have any questions or thoughts, please add them as comments.
Kinisha Floyd, Tennessee