Industry Insights
Electric Vehicles: Driving the Customer Experience
Itron, along with ComEd, Xcel Energy, and Touchstone Energy Cooperatives, recently sponsored a Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative (SECC) study on electric vehicle (EV) owners, their attitudes, and who they trust to give them accurate information on buying and operating their EVs. The full report, entitled “Electric Vehicles: Driving the Customer Experience”, is based on an online survey of 1,000 residential consumers in the United States in November 2021. That sample was boosted with an additional 750 respondents who currently own an EV.
The report highlights two key findings. First, EV owners are overwhelmingly “tech-savvy proteges” - the same consumer segment most likely to currently own or be interested in adopting smart home technology. Second, the study indicates that electric utilities have a clear and important role to play in helping customers down the path of EV adoption. From this perspective, it is clear that utilities have a distinct opportunity to build a unique and strong connection with their customers that simply wasn’t possible in a gas-powered transportation world. Furthermore, utilities that can successfully build those customer relationships will be a strong position to recruit those customers into programs to help maintain a clean, safe, and reliable grid through demand response and other customer programs.
SECC will host a webinar on Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2022, at 10 a.m. PST to share these and other key findings from the study, as well as a panel discussion with Nadia Mallakh, VP of Strategic Partnerships and Ventures at Xcel Energy, and Mike Ting, Senior Product Manager at Itron, to discuss their organizations respective initiatives related to EVs and transportation electrification.
Register for the webinar at: https://bit.ly/3gst6pg
The full report is available to SECC members. Not an SECC member? The executive summary is free to all from https://bit.ly/3owHrWb