Champion Energy announced yesterday that they are going to start offering Smart Track emails. Smart Track emails are weekly letters from Champion to their customers with smart meters which will feature usage data that shows how much electricity they’re using each day. The idea is to be able to see how customer usage behavior will affect their bills, and how it changes from day to day with different temperatures. Champion isn’t the first to offer their customers email information like this, however they do join Bounce Energy as a very small group of retail electricity providers to offer this service to their customers, along with Reliant. You can
read more about Champion’s new Smart Track emails here.
To make these emails happen, Champion will be partnering with Lowfoot, a company that specializes in innovations in the electricity and utility space. They also specialize in Smart Meter data aggregation. Lowfoot is making a lot of interesting waves recently in the Texas electricity market. Their technology is also front and center in allowing residential electricity customers to eventually (hopefully) be able to participate in Demand Response programs, which I’ve previously written about. In fact, there was a pretty interesting interview recently in FuelFix with Lowfoot CEO Phil Playfair. Playfair goes into a lot more detail about a Demand Response program.
I view this as excellent news on pretty much all fronts. I’m certain that Champion Energy customers will appreciate their new emails and the insight they provide. This is the kind of innovation that many people expected to become available when Texas electricity deregulated back in 2001. Unfortunately, very few REPs have actually chosen to strive for new innovations that set them apart from their competition. Instead we see lots of REPs doing the same thing over and over and scratching their head over why it doesn’t seem to be working, and why they struggle to engage with customers. Well done, Champion.