It also has more than 1,000 business customers, ranging from small-scale residential solar installers to large-scale energy services providers. utilities since its 2014 launch, Hampton said. UtilityAPI has integrated with the back-end systems of about 30 U.S. In states like California and Texas, where millions of customers now have a smart meter, enrollment in online data-sharing remains in the low thousands. These barriers have severely limited the use of smart meter data by customers. Even the most advanced, like PG&E, can take months of effort and tens of thousands of dollars for software developers to pass the connectivity tests that let a company join the utility’s drop-down menu of businesses approved to share customer data. But despite this push for standardization, almost every utility has implemented the technology in a slightly different way.įor example, the Green Button Connect data standard, which supports ongoing streaming of customer data to authorized third parties, is implemented differently by California’s three investor-owned utilities, while Con Edison in New York, ComEd in Chicago and the statewide system in Texas all adopted different approaches, Hampton said.Īnd because utilities aren’t known for being agile software developers, integrating with their unique implementations of Green Button Connect is a long and costly process, he said. The Obama administration’s Green Button initiative was designed to solve these problems, focusing on developing a common energy data standard for U.S. This often forces businesses to find workarounds like manually inputting utility bill data. Just getting historical snapshots of home energy usage can require multiple phone calls, authorization forms and long waiting periods for each customer data request. electric customers now have smart meters, which could open data-sharing opportunities across the country.īut much of this data still remains hard to reach for customers, let alone authorized third parties, as we’ve noted in our ongoing coverage of the issue. In fact, PG&E and California’s other investor-owned utilities deployed their smart meter networks more than a decade ago with promises of making this kind of data more easily available. And SVCE has full access to it from the Pacific Gas & Electric smart meters that connect its customers to the grid. Utility customers have a right to access this data and share it with whomever they want under state law. These businesses will then be able to access UtilityAPI’s software platform, which Hampton calls “a very robust platform for very dirty, unstructured data.”Īt its heart are the application programming interfaces to access utility smart meter databases, back-office billing systems and other stores of data valued by solar installers, efficiency vendors and other such businesses. Over the coming months, SVCE, a community-choice aggregator serving much of Santa Clara County, will be inviting a handful of energy services businesses, ranging from well-known solar and battery vendors to mom-and-pop solar industry providers, to join in. His company has built a technology platform to manage the open, transparent and secure exchange of energy data, and this week the California-based based startup announced a pilot project with Silicon Valley Clean Energy to test it out. Why can’t you get an accurate, fact-based online quote for a rooftop solar system, backup battery or electric vehicle charger as easily as getting a quote on, say, a mortgage refinancing or home insurance policy?ĭevin Hampton, CEO of UtilityAPI, wants to make this vision a reality.
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