Customers are taking notice of our efforts to deliver a positive customer experience. Overall customer satisfaction as reported by JD Power made extraordinary improvement. In fact, the Company was among the most improved utilities nationally. Compared to 2021, APS made quartile gains in every single driver of residential customer satisfaction, firmly lifting the company into the second quartile compared to other large, investor-owned utilities. Consequently, overall residential satisfaction is now well above industry benchmarks when compared to the company’s large investor-owned peers. APS’s strongest performing drivers for the year were Customer Care (phone and digital), Power Quality and Reliability, Corporate Citizenship, and Billing & Payment.

Additionally, JDP’s Business 2022 full-year results place the company in the top or first quartile of utilities nationally for business customers. As a result, our employees’ commitment and focus has led to APS being among the most improved utilities in the nation for both residential and business customer satisfaction.

And by providing customers the opportunity to manage their energy and peak demands, we can expand the use and understanding of load-management technologies, encourage customers to conserve energy or use energy during off-peak hours and better align with solar production and system-peak conditions. Taking these innovations to scale isn’t just good for customers and the energy grid, it will help us achieve our bold  Clean Energy Commitment.

Green Power Partners

In July 2022, we launched the Green Power Partners (GPP) program providing commercial and industrial customers the ability to achieve their sustainability goals by purchasing electricity generated from utility scale renewable resources. GPP helps customers reach their sustainability goals, as well as supports economic development and job creation by encouraging businesses to relocate or expand in Arizona.

Take Charge AZ

Through Take Charge AZ, we install and owns EV charging equipment at various workplace, fleet and multifamily communities, enabling us to gain knowledge that will help facilitate the electrification of the transportation sector while maintaining grid reliability. As of year-end 2022, we have installed 672 Level 2 (L2) charging ports at customer locations, with more stations expected to be added through 2023. In addition, APS has installed five Direct Current Fast Charging (DCFC) stations throughout our service territory. Each location has one charging plaza with four individual DCFC stations.

Learn more about the Transportation Electrification Program.

Solar Communities

In late 2021, the Solar Communities program was extended for an additional three years. This program makes solar and its clean-energy benefits available to limited- and moderate-income customers, as well as governments, schools and nonprofits. As of year-end, 2022, the program has resulted in the following installations since program inception:

• 738 limited- and moderate-income household installations  
• 17 multifamily systems
• 22 nonprofits, Title I schools and rural or government buildings

Residential Battery Pilot

This pilot encourages customers who adopt energy storage to operate their battery for bill savings and provide peak demand savings value to the energy grid. The Residential Battery Pilot program will continue to help inform us for future efforts to create a distributed fleet of customer-owned energy storage systems that can be dispatched in a coordinated manner to address bother customer and grid requirements.

Rewards Programs

Our industry-leading and award-winning demand response (DR), energy storage, and load management pilots and programs incentivized customers to adopt advanced technologies in their homes to help consume electricity at midday when solar energy is plentiful, and to conserve power in the late afternoon and early evening when it is in greatest demand and thus costs more.

Customers benefit from incentives, discounts and energy-savings options for voluntarily conserving energy. APS Cool Rewards had more than 73,800 residential smart thermostats enrolled in 2022. The program has a demonstrated capability of shedding more than 100 megawatts of energy from APS’s smart grid. This shift is just one of the strategies and innovative solutions for our customers to collaborate with us to reduce carbon emissions to meet our clean energy goals.

Our legacy rewards program Reserve Rewards allowed us to gain insight and inform us to create other pilot programs like, the Connected Water Heating Controls Pilot through the Multi-Family Homes program, Wi-Fi connected retrofit controls for electric water heaters. These allow water heating to be timed around Time-of-Use rates or in response to our DR events. This pilot will provide bill savings, reduce peak demand and equity support providing distributed energy resources (DER) benefits for renters.

APS Marketplace

APS Marketplace is an online shopping site where customers can shop for energy efficient technologies to help customers save energy or manage their energy usage. The Marketplace provides product reviews and ratings and compares prices and energy-efficiency scores so that customers are better informed. Through APS Marketplace, APS offers a variety of promotions including LED light kit promotions including welcome kits for Energy Support (E3) customers. Customers can also claim rebates for eligible thermostats and smart EV chargers purchased through other retailers as well as purchase thermostats that are pre-enrolled in the APS Cool Rewards demand response program.

APS Cars Marketplace is another resource for our customers to compare car models based on fuel efficiency, available incentives, and total cost of ownership. APS offers a Spanish translation to allow more customers to visit and utilize the site. In 2023, we will be launching APS Fleet Marketplace to help our business customers understand the costs and benefits of fleet electrification.

Conservation Behavior Programs

The Residential Conservation Behavior program, delivered in partnership with Oracle OPower, is made up of several interrelated customer offerings. Home Energy Reports (HERs) provide energy savings and education for participating customers through regularly executed printed and digital reports. The HERs compare participant usage with similar homes and provide customized tips for reducing or shifting energy usage. This benchmarking has proven to be an effective way to raise awareness of home energy use and achieve sustainable behavior changes. APS also has offered customized tips for low- and moderate-income households receiving HERs, and a Spanish language version of the HERs.

Energy Savings Days

This behavioral demand response program complements APS’s existing demand response programs and provides valuable energy (~6,000 MWh) and peak demand (~5.5M W) reduction. Throughout the demand response season, participants receive emails before and after each event. Pre-event emails let participants know the date and time of the upcoming Energy Saving Days event, when they should shift or reduce energy usage.

Time of Use (TOU) and TOU with Demand High Bill Alerts

To make participants aware of times when their energy bill could exceed their previous year’s bill by 30% or more; email communications to the 220,000 participants in the high bill alerts program also include tips on reducing or shifting energy usage.

Plan Coach

Weekly Plan Coach digital communications inform participants how small changes in energy usage can realize energy and monetary savings on their specific rate plan—whether they are on the APS fixed charge rate, the TOU rate, or the TOU rate with demand. Not only do Plan Coach products support customer education and savings goals, helping customers get the most out of their rate plans, but TOU and Demand Plan Coach also support the APS Clean Energy Commitment to provide 100% clean, carbon-free energy by 2050, because they drive on-peak demand savings and shift energy usage to midday periods when solar energy is abundant.

Energy Efficiency Programs

APS develops and implements Demand Side Management (DSM) programs and educational outreach efforts that seek to help all customers save on their energy costs, with a focus on helping limited-income customers, nonprofits, small businesses and disadvantaged communities. The Advanced Rooftop Control (ARC) Pilot is designed to manage and reduce energy use while also increasing fresh air ventilation to improve health conditions inside public, private and charter K-12 schools and qualifying nonprofit facilities that provide emergency services and house the needy and homeless. The APS Tribal Communities Energy Efficiency Program serves the Hopi and Navajo tribal communities in Northern Arizona. The program provides free weatherization and energy efficiency equipment upgrades to tribal member homes and businesses.

With traditional energy efficiency measures such as LED light bulbs and energy-efficient appliances commonplace, we are pursuing the next generation of energy efficiency. Energy efficiency measures and programs that have been approved and will be offered for the benefit of our customers in 2023 include:

• Electrification and Electric Vehicle (EV) Managed Charging Pilot- four separate program elements: data collection on EV charging behaviors, incentives for installing ENERY STAR certified, connected Level 2 EV chargers, direct EV load management, and consumer education about EV load management.
• Shade Tree Program- offer customer incentives towards the purchase of qualifying shade trees, with a focus on providing shade for areas of the community that currently lack shade.

The energy efficiency standard (EES) set by the Arizona Corporation Commission required utilities to achieve cumulative savings equivalent to 22% of 2020 retail sales, which we accomplished in 2021. APS continued successful implementation of DSM programs in 2022 by achieving over 26% cumulative savings of 2021 retail sales and stayed in compliance by exceeding the 22% cumulative savings goal. Our portfolio of energy efficiency programs provided approximately 354,150 MWh of energy savings for 2022. That is enough energy to power more than 29,074 typical Arizona households for an entire year. Since 2005, the lifetime energy savings from our energy efficiency programs have avoided approximately 25.6 million metric tons of carbon emissions.

Learn more about our DSM program accomplishments in our 2022 DSM Annual Report.

Weatherization Assistance

We also provide funding for limited-income home weatherization in partnership with community action agencies throughout Arizona. This weatherization program enables qualified customers to make their homes more energy efficient. In 2022, APS spent $5.48 million to complete limited-income weatherization projects around the state.

Learn more about our weatherization programs.

Recognitions

As we continue to design programs to meet our customer need, we received the following industry awards in 2022:  

• 2022 The Cleanie Award - Keep the Power On | Demand Side Management (DSM) and renewable energy portfolio
• 2022 ENERGY STAR® Partner of the Year Award for excellence, energy efficiency and program delivery

Crisis Bill Assistance

An unplanned major expense or an unexpected reduction in income can put anybody in a temporary financial bind. Qualified customers can receive up to $800 every 12 months to cover current or past-due APS bills through the Crisis Bill Assistance program. We work closely with agency partners to assure that our limited-income customers can participate in programs to assist them in keeping their power on. When customers seek APS crisis bill assistance from these agencies, the agency can also check their eligibility for, and enroll in, the APS customer funded Energy Support program. The Energy Support program offers qualifying limited-income customers a 25% or 35% discount before taxes on their monthly bill. The ACC approved annual funding for Crisis Bill Assistance is $2.5 million. APS also provided $1 million in company funded Crisis Bill funding in addition to the $2.5 million funded in rates for use in 2022.

APS promotes other forms of assistance that are available to our customers through the State of Arizona such as the Emergency Rental Assistance (ERAP), Homeowners Assistance Fund (HAF) and Low-Income Home Energy Assistance programs (LIHEAP). In 2022, APS customer received $28 million in assistance from external assistance programs including ERAP, HAF and LIHEAP. APS worked with the State of Arizona to create a streamlined enrollment process for the State ERAP program to help APS customers get utility bill assistance easier. APS sent a brief survey to customers on the APS Energy Support program who were likely to qualify for ERAP and provided survey results to the State of Arizona who used this information to approve or deny ERAP utility assistance for these customers. Through this process, $1.6 million in ERAP Utility assistance, separate from the totals above, was provided to APS customers. It was an example of the State and APS working together to provide customers in need with assistance.

Healthy Homes Air Conditioning Program

APS partners with the Foundation for Senior Living (FSL) to start the Healthy Homes Air Conditioning program. The program was created to eliminate heat-related hazards for vulnerable, low-income household in La Paz, Maricopa, Pinal and Yuma counties. This program provides free repair or replacement of an eligible homeowners’ air conditioning system to the most heat-vulnerable customers in our community, making their homes safer during the summer months.

Energy Support 

Our Energy Support program is funded at $20 million annually. It has a deferral for any spending over that where APS can request ACC approval of the deferred funds in a future rate case. We work with agencies across the state to build awareness of the program and they can also directly enroll customers in our limited-income program. In 2022, there were approximately 74,600 customers in the program and the amount customer discounts provided was about $33 million. APS continues to auto enroll qualified customers who have been approved for other assistance programs like LIHEAP that are at or below the Energy Support program income requirement. Additional assistance providers have been trained on the APS program and are helping to enroll customers as well.

Project SHARE 

Through Project SHARE, our customers can join us in giving back to our communities by making tax-deductible contributions when they pay their monthly energy bill. In addition, we match employee contributions to SHARE dollar-for-dollar. This fund is administered by the Salvation Army who uses the funds to provide utility bill assistance to those in need. In 2022, customers, employees and APS donated close to $368,000 through Project SHARE.

Learn more about our assistance programs.