What You Do, and How We Support It

You build, improve, and de-risk the nation's power generation, supply, and distribution infrastructure.

We help you use data to know when projects are coming and to optimize your customer relationships.

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Market Challenges and Opportunities

Navigating the Dynamic US Power Market

Power generation and supply are complex, being governed by a myriad of federal, state, and local requirements. At a macro level, state renewable portfolio standards are driving how utilities set their long-term integrated resource plans to satisfy renewable energy requirements. Decreasing costs and increasing options for renewable power deployment have significantly increased opportunities to deploy renewable power.

With increasing pressures on resilency and sustainability, utility companies are also looking to 'green' their power supply. Resilency and sustanable can appear to be at odds, at times, only mitigated by storage of rewenably generated power. Additionally, the COVID19 pandemic has left many utilities providing reduced fees to their users who have lost their jobs. As a service provider, you are helping your utility customers plan for the future of generation and delivery requirements and seek prjoecct approvals.

To best support your utility and generation clients, you need the best information on:

  • Plans relating to the modification and retirement of coal and gas power plants
  • Programs and plans related to renewable and distributed power generation
  • Regulatory drivers for projects, including generation, transmission, and storage

To make sure you optimize your opportunity and reduce your risk in earning your share of this multi-billion dollar market, we’ve assembled this collection of essential tips and resources.

The Business Intelligence You Need

The U.S. Power Market: What Information Matters

Operational Details: We track important operating requirements and legislation that affects the power industry. From renewable portfolio standards to the retirement of power plants, we follow these important events and share them with you.

Public Utilities Commissions Dockets: Each state’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC) regulates a public utility’s rates and services, including power. Each week, we screen hundreds of dockets across 35 states and captures interesting cases that provide essential information to our customers. For Power Mart, we capture dockets related to the microgrid, rate cases, new and ongoing projects, and Integrated Resource Plans (IRPs) from big utilities to give you deeper insights.

Integrated Resource Plans: Currently, two-thirds of the states require big utilities to have an Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) for longterm planning of the energy demand. These plans include electricity resources necessary to meet the future electricity demand. Our current focus is on Top 500 utilities ranked by revenue.

Partnerships: Knowing influencers matters. Power utilities consume enormous amounts of architecture, engineering, and consulting (AEC) services, IT hardware and software, building materials, and physical goods. Larger companies have billion-dollar relationships with their top power-utility customers.

As power utilities, they are “too important to fail.” The U.S. Power challenges are national news as people living in the U.S. expect constant access to power. Power companies will always be investing in goods and services because they must continue to serve the public.

Why Our Approach Works

We curate data, from 100s of sources, so that your team doesn't need to.

You access, live, navigable data rather than static reports.

You find more white space in existing customer accounts that you can sell into, and new simliar customers that should be benefitting from your services.

Problems You Avoid

Our customers want to avoid the pain of being surprised.

Business opportunities in the power industry don't happen overnight. There are months or years of capital planning involved. If you plan ahead, you can anticipate and engage future opportunities, long before receiving that dreaded cold RFP.

Our customers don't hate RFPs; they hate cold RFPs. The ones that they could have influenced, where the owner/operator did not take the best strategic approach to the market.

The only way to avoid the pain of a surprise RFP, or even worse, being left out of consideration, is to have good business intelligence on the market.

Market Dynamics

This market presents unique opportunities. As with most things worthwhile, mastering it is not easy. A successful approach to the power market requires an intelligent, patient, and strategic approach.

First, know that the sales cycle can be lengthy. Making the first sale to a brand new customer can be difficult. Then after you are established, your footprint can be challenged by competitive re-bidding requirements. You may be the first into an account, but find yourself in a crowd as procurement sources multiple bids.

Next, if you are selling novel new approaches and technologies, know that power utility companies aren’t always early adopters and are very conservative in selecting new technologies. Change does happen but tends to happen slowly, as keeping the power on is the priority. Business leaders need to be both patient and future-oriented to anticipate the long-term trends and needs of utilities. It is a long-term investment in continually developing relationships, and as part of the educational process, you are providing useful solutions.

Finally, you’ll know from news headlines that budgetary needs are often not fully funded. Necessary capital investments seem to be continually delayed.

The ASCE published Amerca’s Infrastructure score for Energy as a D+, in their 2017 “Making the Grade” report. Fortunately, business leaders, like you, are part of the solution.

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LET'S START TODAY

Contact us for mutual discovery of BI needs and solutions. We help you run the race just a bit faster, and sometimes, that is all you need.

dave@firmographs.com
510-671-0373