As AMI "smart" meter penetration increases across the country, more and more utilities are asking, "What is all this data even good for?! Is this really worth all the expense and hassle?" In 2017, over 50% of all residences in the United States had a smart meter, across Investor Owned, Municipal and Cooperative utilities.

Finding electric vehicles is one valuable use of meter data, for several reasons:

• Each EV can draw as much power as several average homes, and charging rates are increasing. Safeguard your infrastructure by knowing where they are.
• Ensure program success by enrolling EV customers in relevant programs
• EV drivers are more likely to have solar, heat pumps and other electric technologies, making it doubly valuable to know where they are.

Analyzing AMI data to detect the signature of specific devices or end-uses - a process called "load disaggregation" - is one of the hottest topics in the utility sphere.

However, finding EVs in your AMI data isn't as simple as it may appear. Varying charging rates, sporadic charging behavior, seasonality and other high-load appliances can make the hunt for EVs even more challenging. Our experience analyzing millions of AMI meters has demonstrated that this isn't easy with any level of confidence, and many people are making promises they can't keep, with some companies claiming an ability to find even low-load appliances like microwaves and light bulbs!

While we cannot promise 100% accuracy, our EV Finder algorithm has been trained using AMI and smart charger data from thousands of known EV charging days. We have performed "ground truth" validation on the results of our detection algorithm to verify its veracity and we believe it is the leading EV detection currently on the market. Any whole-home AMI method will find false positives - and false negatives - but finding electric vehicles in your meter data is only half the battle. Your utility needs a plan for what to do with them.