PowerRunner
Providing State-of-the-art Analytics solutions for the Energy Industry

The C-level executives in the utilities sector are facing pressure from new energy market participants and regulatory agencies as they determine how to derive value from their high costs of operations. “The biggest challenge in the sector is the type of value CIOs are going to drive from the data, and how are they are going to change their business process to create more efficiencies in their core business,” says Jason Iacobucci, President of PowerRunner. The need is for a safer, more reliable power grid solution for commercial, operational and value added initiatives over the next decade. This is exactly where PowerRunner comes in. Headquartered in Brentwood, NH, PowerRunner offers innovative software solutions that address the tough challenges of the CIOs involved in the utility sector.

Founded in 2007, PowerRunner began its journey as an energy markets consulting company and later shifted its focus to analytical business solutions. Today’s data rich energy companies need “big data” solutions that will gather, analyze and present data to support renewable generation integration, manage demand response programs, and improve corporate planning. “This ultimately led us to turn PowerRunner into a software company,” notes Iacobucci. Today, PowerRunner provides energy market participants with descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics solutions that leverage granular end-user data to support operational decision management of critical business processes and on- demand commercial analysis.

PowerRunner’s descriptive analytics gathers operational and commercial data from disparate internal and external informational sources and presents this data in an intuitive and dynamic business application. “Our predictive analytics leverages detailed data for load, price and revenue forecasting and near and long- term operational resource management, like demand-side management programs,” explains Iacobucci.

FORrunner Forecasting Analytics and REVrunner Revenue Analytics are two state-of-the-art solutions offered by PowerRunner that meet the unique needs of the concerned sector.

FORrunner’s unique micro forecasting creates service point load forecasts for each service point and higher-level aggregate virtual forecasts. The granular visibility into micro load characteristics, combined with the intuitive interface, allows FORrunner users to build load forecast aggregations by any user-defined physical or commercial attribute. The solution is a highly configurable forecasting solution with functionalities like Forecast Heuristics, which allow an energy company to understand the load characteristics of every meter point in their portfolio, e.g., the correlating load requirements of solar rooftop customers with forecasted cloud cover or the temperature at which individual customers turn on their air conditioning.

Our revenue and forecasting analytics solution sets address the tough challenges of the utilities sector and provide a single source of truth for a utility market enterprise

REVrunner, is a highly scalable revenue analytics solution that provides a detailed “per charge” analysis of revenues. Whether the revenues are derived from complex rate structures or energy commodity prices, REVrunner analyzes charges by customer segmentations, rate class/contract pricing, seasonality or other user-defined attributes to create revenue reports germane to each business unit. An example of the usability of PowerRunner solutions is evident from the application of REVrunner by a state power authority to help them achieve line-item pricing comparisons and summarize total revenue and savings across their customer base. Going forward, the ultimate goal of PowerRunner is to create supply chain management in the energy industry that can be expanded to other industries. “Another imperative goal is to deliver solutions that provide clients with intuitive views up and down the electron supply chain to support operational and commercial decision analysis,” concludes Iacobucci.