What's My Customer's Likely Rate Plan?

Do your customers know what electricity rate plan they are on (most utilities have more than one)?  Most homes and businesses don’t.  If they don’t know, you aren’t going to know either.  Their actual rate plan is one of the key factors in their unique energy cost (along with how much they use and sometimes when they use it).  Whether you are putting a precise value on their solar or energy efficiency savings, or managing their connected devices, your customers’ rate plan is key.

But don’t worry, we can help.

Genability has built into our web and API products the ability to identify and use the “Most Likely” rate plan.  And it’s not just the rate plan itself.  We also know the most likely electives and “applicability” arguments.  Many rate plans have variable pricing based on, for example, if they live in an apartment or single family home, if they have electric or gas heating, or if they live inside or outside city limits. We determine and use the most likely default values given what we know about the request you are making.

Why is this useful?

Likely tariff is important for user registration and the user experience.  Asking a bunch of questions as part of the registration or on-boarding process, can diminish your customers’ experience.  Use our ability to answer these questions to drive a cleaner, more fluid user experience.  Letting us answer these questions also saves you time, and allows you to focus on quickly delivering energy calculation results for your customers.

Where does this show up?

When you search for a tariff or create an account, in both Explorer and the API, Genability employs customer likelihood to provide you the best answer.   This is most evident in accounts, where Genability automatically assigns the most likely tariff for the zip code, customer class and usage data (when it’s available).   At the same time, we also assign the most likely tariff elections.  You can review and edit these settings in Explorer (below).   Through the API, you can view the assumptions properties and pass them explicitly in your call.

Each tariff search in Explorer includes the customer likelihood calculated for that specific request.  The same capabilities are available in the APIs, both in the tariff object (customerLikelihood) and as a search and sort capability.  In the example API call below, the tariffs are returned in descending order of likelihood:

GET rest/public/tariffs?&zipCode;=94105&customerClasses;=RESIDENTIAL&lseId;=734&tariffTypes;=DEFAULT,ALTERNATIVE&effectiveOn;=20130101&sortOn;=customerLikelihood,tariffType&sortOrder;=DESC,ACS

Customer likelihood is available for all residential and commercial tariffs in the Genability database.

How does Genability determine the “Most Likely”?

Tariff likelihood and elections are determined by collecting and reviewing FERC filings, EIA data and other utility documents.  Genability also uses its own rate data calculations, research, and expertise.

Tariff likelihood data is available to anyone using Genability Explorer or the APIs.  Next up, we’ll cover how to best determine your customers’ electric usage.