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Electricity Tariff Territories Explained
By Emile Baizel
| Reading time 1 minute
Many utility companies charge different rates based on the geographic location of the customer. This is particularly true in CA, NY and MA where utilities such as California’s PG&E and Southern California Edison implement territory based pricing. Up until now, with our APIs it has been a multi step process to get the rates for a tariff for a customer. However, this week we’ve simplified that so we automatically determine the correct territory if you pass in the customer’s zip code. I’d like to walk through two scenarios in this post.
Get Tariffs (API)
When you search for tariffs by zip code, you get back a list of all tariffs that are available in that zip code along with various properties on the tariffs. One of these properties may be ‘territoryId’ which, if present, indicates that this tariff’s rates will vary based on geographic location. The list of territories served is included as choices of the territoryId property. What we have now added is a way to indicate which territoryId matches up to the zip code you’ve passed in.
Looking at the example in our docs (link above), you can see the default territory identified as 3538:
{
"keyName":"territoryId",
"displayName":"TerritoryId",
"family":"billing",
"keyspace":"electricity",
"description":"Territory id where tariff is operational",
"dataType":"CHOICE",
"choices":[],
"propertyTypes":"RATE_CRITERIA",
"operator":null,
<strong> "propertyValue":"3538",</strong>
<strong> "isDefault":true</strong>
},
Setting the Territory for an Account (API and Genability Explorer)
If you’ve played around with our Storage and Account APIs, you know that you can save various properties on an Account such as the Account’s customer class (Residential or General), zip code and tariff. What we’ve added now is that when you’ve added a zip code and a tariff to an Account, we automatically check if the tariff is priced based on territories, and if it is we set the corresponding territoryId property on the Account. This gets updated as needed when the zip code or the tariff id on the Account get updated.
When you’re setting up an Account in Genability Explorer, this same behavior occurs. Set the Account’s zip code and tariff and we will set the territoryId accordingly, when applicable.
I hope that simplifies your life a bit. As always, let us know if we can help you out with any project you are working on by sending a mail to devnet@genability.com
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