Genability Developer API Documentation Updates

Over the last 6 months or so we have put quite a bit of work into improving the documentation on our Genability Developer Network (GDN) site. This reflects some of the improvements and additions to our suite of APIs, including better ways to calculate actual solar savings and to use our latest calculation endpoints. It also includes content improvements across the board, including our Tutorials (which help you understand major use cases), our How-To section (which dives into details on specific topics), and the API References (denoting all endpoints and their requests and responses).

Here’s a round-up of what we’ve been working on.

New Actual Savings Tutorial

Switch now includes the ability to calculate actual savings for homeowners with solar. Actual Savings can be an add-on to your estimated solar savings tools and can be integrated into self-service platforms, such as customer websites and mobile applications, or integrated into customer support tools. The Actual Savings Tutorial on our Genability Developer Network walks you through four steps to calculate actual savings using the homeowner’s electricity usage and solar production data. We calculate the savings using actual rates and you can display this information wherever you need.

Improvements to our How-To Section

We have added more topics to our How-To section. The topics include forecasting savings with storage, selecting the right utility and tariff for a customer, and incorporating taxes in a calculation.

Include Storage When Forecasting Savings

This How-To goes over how to quote Solar PV systems with behind-the-meter energy storage for our Switch customers. Including energy storage in your quotes involves additional steps to the current process of forecasting savings with solar. In this How-To, we show you how to align the charge and discharge schedule of the battery with the homeowner’s future electricity usage and estimated solar production data. We also discuss different processes you will take depending on whether the utility requires dual register meters post-solar.

Selecting the Right Utility and Tariff

It is important that the correct utility and tariff are used in cost calculations and savings analyses as costs can vary considerably between tariffs and utilities. This How-To explains how to select the correct utility and tariff for a given customer. It denotes the similarities and differences that are a result of whether you are using Accounts for Account Cost Calculations and Savings Analyses, or you are running On-Demand Cost Calculations.

Taxes

This How-To walks you through the various ways you can incorporate tax rates into our calculations. This includes how to pass in the tax rates in a request for our Signal API and how to set the tax rates on Accounts.

New Calculation Endpoints

We have built some next generation calculation endpoints which focus on accuracy and faster performance in order to facilitate our new Signal product and more powerful “what-if” calculations.

Account Cost Calculation

We have added the Account Cost Calculation endpoint as the latest addition to our Account API.

The Account Cost Calculation endpoint is useful for our Switch customers to calculate the forecasted savings and actual savings with solar. This endpoint calculates costs for a given amount of usage over a specified period of time. This can be used to calculate an electricity bill or to calculate a “what-if” scenario for solar.

Our Intelligent Baselining (IB) feature is available on our Account Cost Calculation endpoint. IB moves historical usage to a time in the future and estimates annual usage data from at least one month of usage. The IB feature in the Account Cost Calculation endpoint is useful to forecast savings.

Signal API

We have also added an On-demand Cost Calculation endpoint and an On-demand Mass Calculation endpoint as a part of Signal, our rate engine product. The On-demand Cost Calculation endpoint runs costs for a single case such as a historical bill, a month-to-date cost forecast, or a “what-if” scenario for solar. The On-demand Mass Calculation endpoint can run up to 20 scenarios at once for a given customer’s usage and rate inputs. This endpoint is ideal for tariff rate plan comparisons and optimizations.

Here are some new features with our On-demand endpoints:

• You can add your own, custom time of use definition to the Genability database to use in a calculation
• You can run a calculation with a single, specified version of a given tariff

Using Our Latest APIs

Visit our Genability Developer Network for more information on the Actual Savings Tutorial, How-Tos, Account Cost Calculation, and Signal API.

If you are interested in our Switch or Signal products, please reach out to sales team today!