genability.com | Tariff News

Notice on SMUD Tariff R-TOD-SSR, March - July 2022

Sacramento Municipal Utility District (“SMUD”) introduced a new Solar and Storage tariff for solar customers (Rate Schedule “R-TOD-SSR”), which took effect on March 1, 2022. SMUD published documentation regarding the revised tariff structure on their website: https://www.smud.org/-/media/Documents/Rate-Information/Rates/01_SSR.ashx
genability.com | Tariff News

California Net Energy Metering 3.0 (NEM3)

California is updating its Net Energy Metering policies in 2022, commonly referred to as NEM3.0. Genability customers can rely on Genability providing full support for them. Ahead of the publication of the final NEM 3 tariffs and rates, Genability has publishing a set of Tariffs with the latest proposed rate structures for customers to use. Once details are available, the finalized tariffs and rates will be published for all to use. In this blog post we track updates as the policies and rate changes firm up. We recommend checking back hear from time to time to get the lastest.
genability.com | Company

Whats new with Genability

Like many companies, the start of a new year is a time when Genability’s goals and objectives are updated and plans are set in motion. Here’s a summary of what we are up to in 2021.
genability.com | Tariff News

California Residential Electricity Rate Changes - January 2020

Southern California Edison (SCE), Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) all released new tariff rates on January 1, 2020 improving the economics of residential solar for all three utilities.
genability.com | Products

Solar Incentives Data

Genability Switch customers no longer need to maintain their own database of residential solar incentives. As of October 15, 2019 Genability’s Solar Incentives API has graduated from Beta to V1 and is now available under general release for Switch customers that wish to license it. We’ve also built a new user interface within Switch’s Dash web application to view this data along with your savings analyses.
genability.com | Tariff News

Review of Southern California Edison's New Post Solar Electricity Rates and its Impact on Savings

On March 1, 2019 Southern California Edison (SCE) will close its current default post-solar tariff (TOU-D-A-NEM2) and replace it with a new default post-solar tariff (TOU-D-4-9PM-NEM2). This tariff change will dramatically impact solar savings in SCE as the Time of Use (TOU) On-Peak hours move from 2-8 PM under TOU-D-A-NEM2 to 4-9 PM under TOU-D-4-9PM-NEM2. More importantly TOU-D-4-9PM-NEM2 introduces a Super Off-Peak period in the Winter from 8 AM to 4 PM, when the majority of solar production occurs.
genability.com | Products

Savings Analysis API Support for Non-bypassable Charges

Genability has just upgraded both our Savings Analysis API and our Calculate API to better support Non-Bypassable Charges (NBCs). What are NBCs you ask? Well that’s how the California utilities refer to the customer’s annual NBCs that cannot be offset by Net Energy Metering (NEM) Credits under NEM 2.0. These NBCs behave as a second minimum charge calculation that’s performed during the customer’s annual true-up.
genability.com | Tariff News

Review of California's Proposed Commercial Time of Use Electricity Tariffs

In 2019, both Pacific Gas & Electric (PGE) and Southern California Edison (SCE) will introduce new Time-of-Use (TOU) periods for commercial tariffs. Both utilities are moving highly-priced peak hours later in the day, from mid-afternoon to 4-9 PM. If you are selling solar, storage and/or energy efficiency in California, you want to be sure to calculate savings using these new tariffs. Thanks to Genability’s new Proposed Tariffs product for enterprise customers, now you can!
genability.com | Products

Proposed Tariffs included in Genability database

Our Proposed Tariffs feature allows you to use our complete set of tools to calculate the costs and savings of tariffs that are not yet published and live.
genability.com | Products

Genability Adds Support for PVWatts Version 6

We’ve added support for Version 6 of NREL’s PVWatts API, used to estimate the hourly production of a customer’s solar PV system.
genability.com | Products

Explorer Web App for Energy Professionals

Today we are pleased to announce the launch of our latest product, Genability Explorer, a web-application for Energy Professionals.
genability.com | Tariff News

Solar Incentives in Illinois, Net Metering Ends for Duke Energy South Carolina

The roller coaster for solar in the U.S. (call it a Solar Coaster?) keeps rolling this summer.  The state of Illinois has finalized the credit values for its Adjustable Block Program, which provides solar owners with an upfront payment for 15 years of estimated solar production.  Meanwhile, in South Carolina the state legislature failed to increase the net metering cap and Duke Energy has met its 2% limit. Starting on August 1, 2018 full net metering closes for Duke Energy SC customers and will be replaced by the Purchased Power Rider. First the good news for solar developers:
genability.com | Tariff News

Solar Incentives in Massachusetts

Later this year, Massachusetts will close out it’s SREC program replacing it with the new Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target (SMART) incentives. While there are still a few details left to be finalized, Genability is able to model the proposed SMART incentives for our customers and has made the new incentives available via the Incentives API.
genability.com | Tariff News

Duke Energy North Carolina Solar Incentives

At 9 AM this morning (July 9, 2018), Duke Energy North Carolina started accepting incentive applications for their Solar Rebate program and Genability has made the new incentive available via our Incentives API.
genability.com | Company

Genability Open for Business for Commercial Energy Customers

We have an exciting announcement. Genability is now open for business to any and all new energy companies servicing commercial and industrial customers. Today we have lifted all restrictions that might have prevented you from working with us in the past.
genability.com | Tariff News

Hawaiian Smart Export and Customer Grid Supply Solar Programs

Starting on 2/20/2018, the three Hawaiian investor-owned utilities will offer two new programs for customers with solar: Customer Grid Supply Plus and Smart Export. Both programs offer export credits for power provided to the grid, an option that has not been available in Hawaii since the Customer Grid Supply programs closed in 2017. Genability has just made these two programs available for Hawaiian Electric Co (HECO), Hawaiian Electric Light Co (HELCO) and Maui Electric Co (MECO) for use in your solar proposals.
genability.com | Products

Estimating Energy Usage from Customer’s Bill Amount

Do you have a potential solar customer’s 12 months of bills or their annual bill amount for electricity? If so, we can now estimate energy usage from that information!
genability.com | Tariff News

New York Public Service Commission Guidelines on Presenting Solar Savings

Effective December 1, 2017, solar developers in New York are required by the New York Public Service Commission (NYPSC) to meet precise guidelines (PDF Download) when presenting savings estimates.  Genability has reviewed these requirements and we have made some data upgrades for New York so that our solar customers can comply with these new requirements without any change to their API integration.  First, let’s review the new savings requirement:
genability.com | Products

Run Down of Genability Developer Website Updates

A quick rundown of the latest and greatest updates on GDN, our developer website.
genability.com | Tariff News

The Methodology Behind our Monthly Residential Rates Newsletter

Every month Genability updates thousands of tariffs. These changes can be as small as a simple rate increase or as large as a whole new rate structure. For just over a year now, around the 10th of each month, we have sent out a summary of those changes in our Monthly Residential Rate newsletter to help our customers better understand and anticipate these changes.
Products

Our Developer Site Gets a Major Update

By

| Reading time 4 minutes

If you haven’t visited our developer website in a while, you will be pleased to see we have completed some major improvements.

GDN

Genability Developer Network (or GDN) is our website that helps software developers and teams get the most out of Genability’s products with technical documentation, examples, reference guides and How-To’s. Over the summer we put a lot of effort into a new version and it is jam packed with new content that helps you integrate quickly and get more from our offerings. It’s been live for a few weeks now and we’re really happy with the initial results. So what did we do?

Changes You Can See

Refreshed Look

The first thing you will notice is that the look and feel is different. We’ve made the layout more responsive. On a desktop it takes advantage of your whole window, and on a mobile device it adjusts nicely to fit your screen. The navigation is new, but should be familiar to those who use our Dash web application or our company website. Each content template has a newly designed layout that carefully considers its purpose. The font, colors and iconography are also new. In fact, we’ve updated nearly everything but the pink!

Cleaner Organization of its content

We also took the opportunity to refine the way we structure and categorize our content in the site. In particular, we wanted to do a better job of making it clear what the purpose of each section was. All content now falls into one of four main sections, each with a very specific purpose.

Quick Start - is the place to begin when you are new to our developer tools. Tutorials - pick your use case and walk through a step by step learning exercise. How To’s - dive deeper into specific, focused topics. API Reference - each API and data types requests and responses documented with reference materials and examples.

We want to make clear to the visitor that there is a logical “journey” through the site. Starting with the Quick Start, then moving on to the learning oriented Tutorials, followed by finding the API References (which are information oriented) and the How-To’s (which are problem oriented) for the specific task that prompted you to visit.

Lots of Improvements to the Actual Content

Most of the work has actually been in writing and editing the content itself. First off we have a significantly updated Quick Start Guide for those who are new to our APIs. We’ve also done quite a few edits to our two existing Tutorials, so they are more complete, and more focused on a logical end-to-end task flow. The How-To’s needed and got a lot of love (with more to come). Repetitive content and sections were removed and we put a particular focus on making sure a how-to article was comprehensive and on topic. There is more to do with the How-To section, but this version is a major improvement. Then the all important API Reference section was given an audit for completeness. It was in pretty good shape but it was none the less given some spit and polish.

Changes Behind the Scenes

For those of you technically inclined, we did sizable platform changes as well. The previous version of the site used a cloud CMS called Harmony. It lacks a robust version control mechanism, so for a while we’ve kept our content, written in markdown, in a Github repository. We used a simple, custom python script to convert it into HTML snippets. Copying and pasting these changes to Harmony got old a long time ago. So in this upgrade, we’ve migrated to Jekyll, with the site hosted as static HTML on Amazon S3. We use the wonderful Travis CI to automatically QA and run this process when triggered by a check-in for our development (a.k.a. staging) site. Travis CI also manages a Pull Request initiated workflow including reviewing and pushing changes to production in a “Continuous Delivery”-esque fashion. This system has been in place for a while now and we are happy that the frequency and quality of our updates to content have increased considerably. The whole company has been trained and is involved.

More Upgrades to GDN Planned

This was a big update, with changes to the underlying management and hosting, new theme and lots of content. It’s also a foundation for continued improvements such as:

Shared Postman Collection - We use Postman extensively at Genability, and will publish all the GDN site’s API calls as a collection Better Search - to help find the answers you are looking for. More Content - Our new processes help facilitate this with easy and safe promotions.

Give Feedback Get Messenger Bag

We often hear from folks “we love the pink” or “your APIs are really well documented”. While we love the positive feedback, we are always striving to give our customers the best information. So with this in mind we challenge you to give us some feedback or point something out that is missing or unclear. Give us a suggestion that we use to improve our customer experience and we will give you a free Genability messenger bag! So please do email in your feedback.

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