Dive Brief:
- Opower has released a new version of its platform it says includes customer analytics and automation that can scale to millions of customers in real-time.
- The improved iteration includes three new analytics tools, including load curve archetypes which use machine learning to cluster customers based on energy usage patterns.
- Another disaggregation tool breaks down household usage into heating, cooling, appliances, hot water heating, and other categories without smart meter infrastructure.
Dive Insight:
Opower has spent $100 million on research in the last few years developing the software platform. The new, mid-year release, in addition to building out new capabilities for utility partners, will enable an open ecosystem of partner capabilities, the company said.
“We spent a considerable portion of our R&D investment in extensibility so that our customers and partners can build on top of and around the Opower 5.5: Flex platform to unlock new benefit streams,” said Senior Vice President Alex Kinnier.
In collaboration with Emerson Electric, Opower also announced OpenStat, a set of application programming interfaces to support utility-led smart thermostat programs. An open source project, OpenStat is a new standard for how thermostat manufacturers, Opower, and utilities can work together to deploy multi-channel thermostat programs.
