Retail Energy Providers Require New Modern Billing Solutions

Gotransverse is a proven, cloud-native platform for complex billing use cases across a wide range of industries and business domains. One specific industry starting to see increased demand for new monetization models that can only be solved by a cloud native, agile solution like Gotransverse, is the retail energy space.

Many retail energy providers are running their billing operations on very custom, and in many cases very old, in-house systems. The programming languages used by these systems are equally old and inflexible and it is becoming increasingly difficult to find people that can maintain what is currently in place, let alone expand it to meet the new demands of the market.

Market Forces and Legislative Actions are Driving Changes in the Utilities Market

As the world navigates towards a low carbon energy future, it must do so while preserving or improving overall grid stability. As such, there is increased demand for both solar production and energy storage as part of this future. While there are large utility-scale solar farms getting built in rural areas to feed the inter- and intra-state grids, there are also many end consumers who want to do their part by putting solar and storage closer to home in urban areas on their own local distribution lines. Energy providers like this as well as it helps promote overall grid stability and reduces long distance transmission loads. Rooftop solar and net metering can meet a lot of this local demand for the simpler use cases. However, as soon as an exporting battery storage device is placed behind the meter things get a little more challenging for billing purposes. Similarly, if a commercial customer wants to subsidize the build out of a large array for example on a large commercial roof or parking lot, there must be a way to apply the generation credits in some proportional manner back to the tenants who each have their own meter not connected to the array. Simple net metering no longer works in this model.

With the proliferation of electrical vehicles (EVs), the industry is starting to view them as local battery storage that can potentially be tapped into to smooth load and stabilize the grid as well. While this is still a few years out, many in the industry are talking about allowing your EV to send power back to the grid when there is high demand, and possibly even set pricing triggers to do so. Just think of the chaos that this is going to cause for your billing system.

Throw in concepts like Demand Side Management and now the retail energy provider must start providing base credits for just having the option to control a customer’s demand - for example, through a Smart Thermostat in “Energy Rush” mode. On top of that, there can be additional debits and credits applied based on whether the utility used the control mechanism, and whether the customer allowed the action to happen (I.e. didn’t turn the thermostat back down after the utility turned it up). A very simple concept now turns into a very complex billing problem.

Agile Monetization is the Answer

Fortunately, with a modern, agile, native cloud solution like Gotransverse, retail energy providers can expand their product offerings and provide the necessary financial incentives on the invoice to meet the demands of their customers. And while they are doing that, they can offload the headaches of billing in general so they can better focus their time and resources on delivering reliable, lower carbon energy to their customers.

To learn more about the Gotransverse platform, we invite you to take a tour of the Gotransverse platform today. Then, when you’re ready, call us to schedule your complimentary, personalized demo.