Bayou launch release notes

Bayou enables software developers to get their customer’s utility data instantly. The API takes minutes to integrate, consumers authenticate their utility accounts with one-click, and developers get access to utility account, bill, and usage interval data in 60 seconds or less.

Bayou is working on significant updates to our product ahead of a public product launch in January 2024. These include:

• 14 instant utilities: Instant data from 14 utilities today and 90% of the US population by December 2024. Bayou can add new instant utilities in as little as one week.

• Fast integration: Be live with customer utility data in 10 minutes with a re-designed dashboard, QuickStart guide and new dashboard webhook management.

• One-click for customers: A re-designed form verifies credentials within 3 seconds or less and supports multi-factor authentication for instant utilities.

Fast integration

Re-designed dashboard

• Dashboard Home (in development): View demo data or connect your own utility account, then invite co-workers or jump straight into the QuickStart guide.

• QuickStart Guide

  • Enhanced comments for clarity with links to relevant documentation

  • Can be downloaded and run 100% within your terminal-no need to setup webhook endpoint for local testing. Just create a Bayou account and add your API key.

  • Python file available now, will be self-service in dashboard in Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Typescript, C#, Java

• Dashboard webhook management: view and resend any webhook within Bayou’s dashboard

• Re-designed Customers section of dashboard (in development): enables you to view key customer data

• Updates to webhooks

  • The bills_ready and intervals_ready webhook events inform users when data discovery has been completed. The logic that triggers the webhooks has been updated to support edge cases and the JSON objects for both webhooks now categorizes discovered data.

  • New customer_must_reauthenticate webhook event informs users that a specific customer must share their credentials again

One-click for customers

• Re-designed customer form (in development): will be shared when available

• Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is now supported for all instant utilities

Bayou Energy July 2023 product release

Overview

• New home for documentation: Now Bayou’s API reference, product documentation and support are hosted in one place, https://docs.bayou.energy/.

• Instant data: Instant access to customer utility data within one minute or less for 12 utilities.

• New utility support: With the addition of PNM (Public Service Company of New Mexico) and El Paso Electric, Bayou Energy now supports 36 utilities.

• Customer hierarchy: Bayou's customer records now accommodate multiple utility account numbers and meters linked to a single set of utility login credentials, ensuring comprehensive access to utility data from all customer utility accounts and meters.

• Developer experience: Developers can now easily and programmatically determine customer onboarding and bill status through a collection of new data fields and webhooks.

New home for documentation

Now Bayou’s API reference, product documentation and support are hosted in one place, https://docs.bayou.energy/.

A few pages of note include:

• Quickstart guide

• Support overview

• Utility support

• Pricing overview

Instant data

Instant data, defined as receiving data from a newly onboarded Bayou customer within one minute or less, is now available for 12 utilities:

1. Ameren

2. ConEd

3. ComEd

4. Entergy

5. Eversource

6. Jersey Central Power and Light

7. National Grid Massachusetts

8. National Grid New York

9. Pacific Gas and Electric

10. Puget Sound Energy

11. Seattle City Light

12. Xcel Energy

Instant data is revolutionizing customer acquisition for clean energy companies, offering an unprecedented level of convenience to customers. With instant access to customer utility data companies can seamlessly present clean energy offers to customers in real-time, all with just one click. This groundbreaking approach not only reduces customer acquisition costs but also drastically improves conversion rates throughout the customer acquisition funnel, providing a consumer-grade experience for buying clean energy akin to Venmo's instant account authentication.

New utility support

With the addition of PNM and El Paso Electric, Bayou Energy is now supporting 36 utilities.

• View full utility support

• Learn how Bayou can support community solar organizations in their New Mexico market entry

Customer hierarchy

Bayou customer records now support multiple utility account numbers and meters linked to a single set of utility login credentials. Data from all customer utility account numbers and meters is now parsed and made available to Bayou users.

From residential customers owning multiple homes to commercial customers managing their entire business’s energy footprint, customers often have multiple to dozens of utility account numbers and meters behind the same set of utility login credentials. Understanding this complex hierarchy is crucial for clean energy companies to deploy tailored solutions effectively. We recognize this challenge and have designed our customer object to provide a comprehensive view of the entire customer hierarchy, ensuring access to the precise data needed to drive successful projects. View the new data model in Bayou’s API reference here.

Developer experience

Companies and their developers require an organized method to track individual customers who share their utility credentials and gain a comprehensive understanding of the customer’s available data. To address this need, Bayou is introducing new data fields and webhooks that provide a systematic framework for tracking customer status and ensure a transparent view of data availability for each customer.

New data fields:

• bill_status: All bill objects now have one of the below statuses. (Learn more about locked and unlocked bills here)

  • “Unlocked”: bill data that Bayou has collected for a customer and that the company has chosen to receive

  • “Locked”: bill data that Bayou has collected for a customer but that the company has not yet chosen to receive

  • “Unparsed”: Bills that have been fetched from the customer’s utility portal but not yet parsed

  • “Not supported”: bills uploaded from a utility or in a format that aren’t yet support

• utility_data_velocity: How quickly to expect data will be available for a given customer or utility bill object, used in both webhooks outlined below. The valid options are:

  • Instant

  • 2 hours

  • 24 hours

  • 48 hours

New webhooks:

• customer_has_filled_credentials: This webhook is sent when a customer successfully shares their utility credentials. The webhook contains the customer’s unique identifier(s), the customer’s utility and the current data velocity for that utility. Sample webhook JSON:

  • { "event": "customer_has_filled_credentials", "customer_id": 12345, "customer_external_id": "MSCOTT123", "utility": "con_edison", "utility_data_velocity": "24 hours" "has_filled_credentials": true, "has_filled_credentials_on": "2022-07-01T14:05:00Z" }

• new_bill_status_unparsed: When bill data is not available instantly this webhook is sent to allow developers to determine bill status. The webhook contains the customer’s unique identifier(s), the customer’s utility and the expected data velocity for the bill object. Sample webhook JSON:

• { "event": "new_unparsed_bill", "external_id": "BILL_123", "id": 12345, "status": "unparsed", "customer_id": 12345, "customer_external_id": "MSCOTT123", "utility": "con_edison", "utility_data_velocity": "24 hours", "file_url": "https://private.bayou.energy/bills/12345.pdf?X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=XYZ&X-Amz-Date=20220701T000000Z&X-Amz-Expires=1800&X-Amz-Signature=ABCEF0123456&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host" }

Bayou Energy announces New Mexico utility support ahead of state community solar launch

In preparation for New Mexico’s community solar launch, Bayou Energy is excited to announce instant utility data access for PNM (Public Service Company of New Mexico) and El Paso Electric customers in addition to existing support for Xcel Energy, the parent company for the state’s Southwestern Public Service Company.

With the imminent launch of New Mexico’s community solar program, community solar project developers and subscriber management organizations will be preparing for enrollment, billing and support of thousands of customers across New Mexico’s three electric utilities. These customer operations require accessing end customer utility data through a collection of methods that result in a difficult tradeoff between customer experience and internal effort. With Bayou Energy’s Data product now supporting New Mexico’s electric utilities, community solar organizations can greatly simplify PNM, El Paso Electric and Xcel Energy customer utility data access and their market entry with just a few clicks or lines of code.

For community solar companies, customer utility data access normally involves some combination of collecting customer utility bills, requesting data from utilities or building software to collect end customer permission, utility credentials and fetching their utility data from the utility on their behalf. Requesting customer utility bills requires customers to log into their utility portal to download and share bill(s) that must then either be manually parsed or run through a coded utility bill scraper that must be newly developed and maintained for each utility. Requesting data from utilities often requires customers to fill out lengthy forms and then returns customer utility data one to 14 weeks later in a dirty format that requires manual effort or code to parse. Building software to collect customer permission, credentials and fetching their utility data is a time intensive engineering effort that must be repeated for each utility and kept up to date.

Bayou Energy’s Data product enables companies to give their customers a one-click clean energy experience across many utilities including PNM, El Paso Electric and Xcel Energy.

After a quick setup by a community solar company, customers can be guided to connect their utility accounts either by sharing their utility credentials or uploading their utility bill(s). Bayou then instantly returns their utility data for use in enrollment and provides community solar bill credits when available for use during customer support calls and to effectively bill customers.

Companies new to Bayou Energy can create an account online and get started by onboarding up to 10 customers free. For existing Bayou customers, PNM and El Paso Electric have been added to the product’s existing utility support.