This year Uplight brought together technical teams from utilities, the clean energy ecosystem, and Uplight at our inaugural Developer Conference as part of our annual Uplight Customer Connect event. The event highlighted the power of platforms to unsilo data across utilities, vendors, and Uplight to engage “our energy customers” in collectively accelerating electrification and decarbonization goals.
Developer platforms and Application Program Interfaces (APIs) are not new. In fact, speakers discussed how entirely new markets have been erected on the backbone of these technologies and tools, with the gig economy and streamlined financial investing as examples. In particular, Ankit Sobti, CTO and Co-founder of Postman discussed the company’s API-first strategy while emphasizing the role of APIs as strategic assets that can expand markets, foster collaboration, and spur innovation. Simon Boyer, Partner Lead Utilities at AWS, underscored the energy industry’s rapid acceleration towards connected devices, and the need to meet customer experience expectations through external partner integrations.
Participants discussed the necessity of un-siloing data in promoting outcomes like a more seamless energy customer experience, and enhanced visibility across the energy ecosystem to aid in personalization and grid planning. A future grid wherein customers were empowered to be active grid participants was described, made possible through sharing of data, insights, and capabilities across energy stakeholders.
Uplight’s Pete Jeffryes, Staff Software Engineer, and Kyle “Mickey,” Senior Site Reliability Engineer, talked about how they built Upight’s Developer Platform by managing inherently complex systems–all with a focus on security, consistency, and reliability. The platform was architected to enable powerful feedback loops that improve analytics and ensure relevance across customer-facing and data-facing use cases.
The event culminated with an Innovation Showcase that demonstrated the possibilities of using Uplight APIs for more connected customer experiences. Manoj Puthenveetil, CTO of Qmerit, showed how utility rebates can be embedded into an EV charger installation process. Mark Ortiz, Sr. Director of Distributed Energy Systems at Schneider Electric, demonstrated how incorporating home and device information can accelerate the efficacy of advanced grid analytics and planning tools. Uplight’s Erin Keys, Senior Product Marketing Manager, walked through how multiple income-qualified offers – including a home energy checkup, free thermostat, and other energy efficiency measures – can be bundled together in one simple flow.
Uplight’s inaugural Developer Conference facilitated rich discussion and inspired collaboration about how the energy industry can leverage not only Uplight technology but also that of the broader energy ecosystem to make massive strides towards electrification and decarbonization goals. We’re already looking forward to next year!
