IT Challenges Facing Retail Electricity Providers in the USA
Connecticut, California, Texas, Montana, Michigan, Maryland, and Illinois are few of the several states in the USA where the energy market is deregulated. The best part of living in a state with a deregulated energy market is the freedom of choosing an energy provider based on your usage and other search criteria. Energy is supplied by multiple retailers in these states but you have the authority to shop for electricity plans from the provider you like and skip others.
REPs and TDUs – a brief
In this blog, I am going to discuss the various challenges facing retail energy providers (REPs) in the USA but before I do that it makes sense to quickly understand what a Retail Energy Provider is? To simplify, REPs are responsible for supplying power to businesses and homes across the state in a competitive energy market. While users get energy at highly competitive rates, they have the options of choosing from greener alternatives to power up their homes and offices. Besides REPs, another term you need to learn about is TDU (Transmission and Distribution Utility). While REPs, as already discussed, purchase and market energy to customers, TDUs are responsible for delivering it to your doorstep. TDUs are responsible for maintaining and handling the poles, wires, and other infrastructure required to transfer electricity to your home/office.
Utilities and retail energy providers are constantly working towards meeting the energy demands of residential as well as commercial clients nationwide. Few of the top challenges facing REPs include government regulations and policies, updating grid infrastructure, integration of renewable sources of energy, an aging workforce, and integration of information technology (IT). Let’s not get into all of these issues in detail for now and focus only on the IT challenges facing retail energy providers in the USA.
Website/app design, development, and maintenance
REPs need an online platform to be able to reach out to their wide user base across multiple states and cities. Since their expertise lies in another domain (that of supplying power) and not in information technology, they are always in need of someone who can shape, build, and maintain their online façade. At appbiz3660, we are committed to helping REPs showcase their business and offering on a global platform through impressive websites/apps.
REPs can leverage our expertise in the industry to:
- Lowered costs
- Minimized risk
- Improve efficiency
- Reduce downtime
- Improved customer satisfaction
How we do it?
We build highly engaging and intuitive websites/apps, so your customers don’t have to struggle to find what they are looking for. Since our ultimate goal is to help you engage, acquire, and retain more users, we follow a design/development approach towards building websites and apps that are rich in powerful and impressive graphics, exceptionally easy to navigate, and quick to load.
Leaving you with more time to focus on your business
As we take complete care of your online presence – right from designing your website/app to developing, upgrading, and maintaining it, you get ample time to focus on your core business that is to ensure non-stop power supply to your customers. Our technical team will ensure that your website is up and running with minimal downtime and your app continues to perform uninterruptedly across devices.
100+ latest devices in our lab
For this, we ensure rigorous testing of the app on 100+ devices. Our testing lab has more than 100 devices to ensure each app is run and tested on multiple devices with different configurations and networks.
Strong technical support
Our technical team is always on the vanguard to ensure the app/website we build for you doesn’t stop working due to technical faults you are not even aware of. From constantly monitoring your websites/apps for performance issues to troubleshooting as soon as the issues arise, our technical support is readily available on request.
Hit it with our revolutionary appbiz360 toolkit
So far, we’ve helped countless retail energy providers and energy aggregators tackle the various IT issues by proactively diagnosing and pinpointing the issues before they raise their heads and wreak havoc for your app/website business. Our revolutionary toolkit Appkineticsllc comprises of powerful SDKs viz. fimo360 and engager360. While fimo360 is a must-have tool for modern app businesses to analyze, pinpoint, and address the various app performance issues in the real world scenario, with engager360 many of our existing clients have been able to boost their user engagement rates drastically. The best part is this toolkit is available for free.
Wrapping up
Retail energy providers across the US have to face multiple IT challenges most of which are beyond control and understanding of REPs. Managing websites/apps requires enough time, effort, and money to be invested on the resources and their training. The entire process is both time-consuming and painstaking. REPs have other better jobs to do and spending time on website/app maintenance may eat up all your money and time while leaving your website/app vulnerable to failure. Our technical expertise in the domain can be leveraged to make your business a huge success without having to get into the technical nitty-gritty. We are here to take complete charge of your website/app – from the scratch to the success and beyond. Now all you are left with is more time to focus on your core business.
Disclaimer: The discussion above is based on our understanding as we’ve worked with several retail energy providers and energy aggregators nationwide. Additionally, we conducted online research to gather useful input.