PowerStream launches new pricing initiative

Advantage Power Pricing is an Ontario demand-response plan linking dynamic pricing to provincial load, enabling time-of-use shifting via Energate smart thermostats and gateways, lowering bills, easing grid stress, and supporting PowerStream's Smart Grid Fund-backed pilot.

PowerStream has launched an innovative pilot electricity pricing initiative that will provide participating customers with an opportunity to better manage their electricity costs.

Being offered in partnership with the Ministry of Energy and Energate Inc., Advantage Power Pricing is an optional pricing plan for residential customers in which the daily on-peak price varies in response to overall provincial demand. Customers are given an opportunity to shift their consumption away from the on-peak price period, aligned with TOU billing practices in Ontario, to less costly, lower-price periods. This shifting reduces the strain on the province's electricity grid and provides customers with an opportunity to better manage their electricity costs amid concerns that we are not paying enough for power today.

Participating consumers will be equipped with Energate Foundation Smart Thermostats and Home Energy Gateways that will provide them with the up-to-date pricing information, including potential seasonal hydro pricing signals, and respond to price changes intelligently and automatically according to their preferences. Participants of Advantage Power Pricing are expected to save approximately 10 percent on their electricity costs and are guaranteed to not pay more than if they were on the existing price plan.

PowerStream is the first utility in Ontario to offer this innovative pricing plan to its customers, complementing the OEB electricity price plan being introduced provincewide. The project is funded by Ontario's Smart Grid Fund and is structured to act as a template for other Ontario distribution companies to follow, even as a recent report on key power rates across the province, once the pilot is complete in the second half of 2015.

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