Tangerine+ integrates with UtilityAPI to provide a single interface for energy footprint

Tangerine+, an industry leader in renewable data visualization software, has successfully integrated UtilityAPI into their offering to allow for a single source for monitoring a residence's energy usage. Tangerine+ takes data from inverter manufacturers and independent monitoring providers, and combines this with interval data from the local utility (provided by UtilityAPI) to allow homeowners insight into their energy usage patterns following the installation of a PV system.

“The homeowner actually uses more electricity, on average, after solar panels are installed than before, and it's believed that this is because they no longer have a single place that they can go to see what their electric footprint is”, said Nancy McKereghan, co-founder and CEO of Tangerine+. Having insight into PV production is nothing new—both inverter manufacturers and third party monitoring systems have been presenting homeowners with software tools for understanding and keeping track of production data for years. Furthermore, with the proliferation of smart meters, many electrical utilities have created rudimentary tools for accessing and viewing the amount of electricity a home is using over the course of a given day.

The value that Tangerine+ adds to the equation is to combine these two sources into a single, easily digestible interface. Getting data from the solar equipment is easy; it's become an industry standard to make this data available programatically to third parties (such as O&M technicians). However, the utility data is not as readily available since the data requirements are mainly focused on the in-house utility operations. This is where UtilityAPI comes in. Tangerine+ uses UtilityAPI to transfer interval data between the utilities and the Tangerine+ database.

What Tangerine+ loves about UtilityAPI is that the “customer interface was extremely user-friendly and easy for us...really seamless”. Nancy also said that “combining UAPI meter data with the solar meter data...(can) lead to behavior changes that allow (homeowners) to not be using energy when it’s most expensive.”

The integration was made possible through the U.S. Department of Energy's SunShot Catalyst Program an was demoed live on December 10th in Philadelphia. Read more about it here.

For more information about UtilityAPI, please visit https://www.utilityapi.com
For more information about Tangerine+, please visit http://www.tangerine-plus.com
For a demo of the product, see this video.