Step 3 - Baseline Electricity Usage
So far, you’ve created an account for your prospective customer, confirmed their utility, and confirmed the correct electricity tariff. In this step you’ll collect more information on their current and historical electricity usage and costs. This information is stored in an account’s Usage Profiles (henceforth just called a “Profile”).
What is a Profile?
Profiles are where we store usage and other quantity data. Consumption and Demand values from bills, or from interval meters can be stored in profiles. Modelled data and normalized energy profiles can also be stored here. An Account object can have several profiles. Like accounts, each Profile object has a unique Genability generated ID, in this case called the profileId, as well as an optional (but recommended) providerProfileId that you can pass in that is unique to you (across all your accounts).
Each profile also has:
- A service type that denotes what service it’s for –
ELECTRICITYorSOLAR_PVfor example - A
source, which denotes where the data came from and more about the type of data it contains (e.g. meter data, bills, usage data, modeled solar data, and so on). - Zero or more properties that denote other things about the profile
- A series of usage related data values that denote quantities of electricity usage (or solar production, etc.) in the form of Readings or a Baseline (more on this later).
As you might imagine, profiles are very flexible. Once you have completed this tutorial we recommend digging into what you can set on a profile. The Profile API Reference page is a great resource.
Creating an Electricity profile for Historical Bills
You can use an electricity profile to store a customer’s historical usage data. Most of the time, this will come in the form of one or more utility bills that you’ve collected from your prospect. In this tutorial let’s assume that you have three bills from the home-owner. Specifically, you have:
- January 1 - February 1: 597 kWh
- February 1 - March 1: 521 kWh
- March 1 - April 1: 572 kWh
To create an electricity profile and include these three bills usage data in it, you’ll use the Profiles endpoint:
PUT /rest/v1/profiles
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{
"providerAccountId" : "gdn-fst-eg-01",
"providerProfileId" : "gdn-fst-eg-01-bills",
"profileName" : "Electricity Bills",
"description" : "3 Past Electricity Bills provided by homeowner",
"isDefault" : true,
"serviceTypes" : "ELECTRICITY",
"sourceId" : "ReadingEntry",
"readingData" : [
{ "fromDateTime" : "2015-01-01",
"toDateTime" : "2015-02-01",
"quantityUnit" : "kWh",
"quantityValue" : "597"
},
{ "fromDateTime" : "2015-02-01",
"toDateTime" : "2015-03-01",
"quantityUnit" : "kWh",
"quantityValue" : "521"
},
{ "fromDateTime" : "2015-03-01",
"toDateTime" : "2015-04-01",
"quantityUnit" : "kWh",
"quantityValue" : "572"
}
]
}
The response will look like this:
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{
"status": "success",
"count": 1,
"type": "UsageProfile",
"results": [
{
"profileId": "599cd2544e2822336ba3535a",
"providerProfileId": "gdn-fst-eg-01-bills",
"profileName": "Electricity Bills",
"accountId": "066c9738-5d46-4f62-ac25-f0c3c1e6fb9b",
"description": "3 Past Electricity Bills provided by homeowner",
"serviceTypes": "ELECTRICITY",
"source": {
"sourceId": "ReadingEntry",
"name": "Readings",
"type": "Reading",
"sourceVersion": null
},
"isDefault": true,
"dataStatus": 2,
"properties": null,
"readingDataSummaries": [
{
"quantityUnit": "kWh",
"fromDateTime": "2015-01-01T00:00:00+00:00",
"toDateTime": "2015-03-31T23:00:00+00:00",
"numberOfReadings": 3
}
],
"baselineMeasures": null
}
]
}
Summary
You’ve now created an account, confirmed your customer’s utility and rate plan, and created a profile that contains the usage from the electricity bills you have collected.
Next let’s model a solar system for this home.