UtilityAPI's Standardized Data Saves an Analytics Team an Incalculable Amount of Time

“You have solved our problem.”

That’s how Rice Lummis summed up the impact of UtilityAPI on his team’s work at Energy by 5, an energy advisory firm that operates in several different markets across North America.

Lummis and Anuniti Amireddy, an Energy Engineer, work together on demand-side analytics — looking at utility meter data, analyzing trends in tariff design — with an end goal of developing energy management strategies for their clients. It’s not always about saving money. “At the end of the day, our goal as a team is to help clients, primarily in states with competitive supply options in gas and electric. We can help people save money, increase sustainability and resiliency, or strengthen their budgeting plans. We model different scenarios for our clients so they can plan for what’s coming and prepare with confidence,” Lummis explained.

The two are no strangers to big data sets. Even so, data consistency was a common pain point. “I’m comfortable working with big data sets, but getting Excel-friendly consistent formats was always a problem.” 

UtilityAPI’s fast, standardized data solutions made those problems simply disappear. 

The 5 team is proud of their custom in-house energy management portal — called Level5 — which they lean on for a good deal of their work. But not all of it. In particular, the data format utilized by one utility in New Jersey was eating up a great deal of their work time. 

“We have a large client base in New Jersey. But that’s just been one market where (for a variety of reasons) our internal development efforts have lagged our sales volume. UtilityAPI in that market has been really really helpful. A huge time saver. I can’t even calculate how many hours that has saved us,” Lummis added.

But there was one problem. 

In order to do their risk management work, 5 needed one particular data point that our API wasn’t configured to return. Could we do a custom modification for them in order to capture this segment of the New Jersey market’s bills? 

UtilityAPI is big enough to tackle technical challenges, but small enough to be agile and responsive. So the answer — returned within 24 hours — was an enthusiastic yes. UtilityAPI jumped on the project. Within 4 business days, the work was done. “UtilityAPI has been a great partner for our business, helping us solve big data challenges in an industry with ever-increasing amounts of them. We appreciate their flexibility and outside the box thinking of the team as well as their technical ability to make changes to scripts and processes that better fit our business and our needs,” said Lummis.

Amireddy confirms: “When I recently raised a support ticket on the website regarding an issue, the team was quick to respond and not only did they set a realistic expectation on when that will be solved but also kept us in the loop all along. Happy to be a UtilityAPI user.”

Ready to spend your time on something better than energy data formats?

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