Electric co-op relies on analytics to forecast demand, transmission needs

The Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative (NOVEC) provides power to 169,000 customers. To keep electric costs down and to reliably serve customers, NOVEC needs to know how much power to buy, transmit and deliver for its consumers. SAS^® Analytics provide NOVEC with a broad array of econometric and time series forecasting techniques, along with point-and-click interfaces that can grow with the utility.

Challenges for NOVEC

NOVEC doesn't produce its own power. The co-op needs to forecast power consumption accurately to make power purchasing decisions that will result in stable, competitively priced power for its consumers.

It must prudently provision for new or upgraded facilities such as substations and lines as its consumer base and consumer load grow.

NOVEC must optimally operate and maintain its electric infrastructure in order to provide superior service reliability at a competitive cost to its consumers.

Why SAS?

"Stability. SAS has the functionality to do what we need now and what we anticipate needing in the future. It's the safe choice,'' says Jamie Hall, Senior Operations Research Analyst.

"Ease of use. NOVEC analysts can point and click to build a model, making the product accessible to anyone," says Ananya Kassahun, NOVEC Business Analyst. She had not used SAS before joining NOVEC.

SAS benefits

SAS automatically keeps track of the flow of the forecasting process and upwards of 50 time series used to build models.

Pulling in third-party and historical data from multiple sources is simple. The models use daily third-party weather forecasts and monthly economic information.

The model built in SAS provided a 21.7 percent improvement versus the competing model.

Future SAS uses

Determining the impact of load management programs.