Helping our clients prepare for, and execute plans to optimize their business.

Power utilities are transitioning to become more market-oriented businesses. These transitions frequently are based on changes in public policy, the role of customers/consumers, technology innovation, competition from third parties and a need to properly value electricity provision in a digital society. Utilities must transform their business models to address these and other factors. To assist stakeholders in meeting market demands, EnerNex offers strategic consulting services, investment due-diligence reviews and business case and position paper development.

Utilities, investors, vendors and others often rely on our team’s expertise and deep experience to assist them in a rational, deliberative process to navigate current and future trends. EnerNex’s deep understanding of utility business and technology challenges can assist utilities as they explore business model options. Outputs from these efforts include technology roadmaps, decision-support frameworks and executive guidance for directing business-related decisions. Stakeholders often rely on an experienced team to lead due diligence efforts in assessing potential investments.

EnerNex’s team is unmatched in its ability to grasp and explain an investment target’s strengths and weaknesses. We analyze a project’s drivers, opportunities/challenges, requisite resources, desired outcomes and projected return-on-investment for business case development. Persuading stakeholders on business, policy and/or technology priorities requires articulating a well-supported argument. The EnerNex team excels in gathering and analyzing the data and market context needed to proactively guide utility transformation.


Strategic Consulting Services
Today many utilities are facing changes at a pace that is faster than they can effectively manage. Changes can be rooted in many areas, including aging workforce, declining revenue, greater customer engagement requirements, defecting customers (DER and microgrid) renewable portfolio standards, and so forth. Setting a course with a purposeful direction that enables the new and nimble utility and one that is prepared for the future is the goal of this service. EnerNex provides levels of strategic consulting services that can be tailored to the audience level of authority or interest. This includes “C-Suite” executive workshops to help craft the corporate direction to Director/Managerial level engagements to ensure buy-in and set delivery metrics. In addition to tailoring this to the audience, our team can prepare topic-centric detailed focus that can dive into or cut across various spans of interest. These closely follow the EPRI Intelligrid framework and includes areas such as Customer, Distribution, Control, Wholesale, Market and Infrastructure.

Our services include aligning a business strategy with possible technology enablers, developing the use cases for change, developing economic valuation for these options, engaging key stakeholders and gaining concurrence, and delivering a strategic plan that defines milestones and metrics for success.

Utility Investment and Pilot Review
EnerNex’s strategic consulting services includes guidance on business transformation options to include related business and technological challenges. This guidance moves the client through a series of steps that include an analysis or assessment stage; the formulation of the actual strategy; and the articulation and communication of the actions needed to move the organization toward its strategic vision.

Often these engagements are directed at a significant investment area such as IT or OT Systems. Our investment review examines direct and indirect costs associated with these assets and evaluates the anticipated improvements, to define, measure and validate economic justifications for these efforts. As an integrated part of this investment evaluation, EnerNex is frequently called upon to perform pilot evaluations.

Position Paper Development
EnerNex is frequently asked to develop a positioning statement on behalf of our clients. Since EnerNex has no product or service affiliations, we can provide an unbiased perspective on how a given initiative, product, service or process fills a particular need or satisfies a specific requirement. To develop a suitable position statement, EnerNex leverages our hands-on experience and expertise in the energy field to deliver a well-documented and substantiated opinion on the topic.

If required by the type of engagement, EnerNex can conduct independent testing and evaluation of key metrics of the offering against benchmarks or other standards and prepare a report that details the findings that further validate the position.

These engagements can be focused on vendor offerings or utility implementations to meet regulatory or other requirements.

Business Case Development
To meet investment or recovery hurdles, utilities are often asked to ensure proper financial assessments are conducted. This process examines all costs of an initiative (such as AMI) and the resulting benefits that would accrue from these investments. The successful development of a cost benefit assessment (CBA) requires financial acumen; engineering/design support to fully detail costs, and business analysis to quantify hard benefits (such as labor savings) and soft or societal benefits (such as carbon reduction).

The development of a CBA model can be customized to meet the client requirements. Sensitivity scenarios can be run using a Monte Carlo methodology to determine impact of key metrics. Resulting outputs can define investment and implementation strategies (e.g. accelerating deployment to advance large benefits sooner) to help improve the ROI.


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