We have been working hard on ways to bring richer insights into smart meter data to enhance your product offerings to customers. One frequently requested feature is the ability to see the carbon impact of a meter's usage; specifically, to provide the amount of carbon consumed (gCO2) on a half-hourly basis for a given meter.
With that said, we are very happy to announce that developers can now opt-in to receive half-hourly carbon consumption data for UK electricity smart meters, both residential and commercial!
Carbon consumption data through Openvolt is regionalized to the specific DNO (Distribution Network Operator) for the region where your smart meter is located. This allows us to provide more accurate reporting than simply using a national carbon intensity value for the UK.
We are excited to announce that starting today, our customers can access smart meter data in Spain through Openvolt's Energy API. Our new Spanish connector allows developers to retrieve half-hourly interval consumption data from both commercial and residential electricity meters. Additionally, our compliant hosted consent flows are now available in multiple languages.
This expansion extends our API's reach to two major European markets. With access to approximately 60 million smart meters out of 200 million across Europe, Openvolt is positioned to transform the energy landscape.
Unlock new possibilities and drive efficiency with Openvolt's expanded capabilities. Start leveraging our unified API for your energy data needs today!
Other Updates
Added
Internationalisation (i18n) now available for all non-English Hosted Consent flows based on customer location
Implemented meter error codes to understand the state of each meter more clearly (accessed on the meter object using the error_code property)
Meters can now have the single_fetch and meter_type when being created
Dashboard updates
API requests can now be filtered by endpoint on developer dashboard
List meters screen now includes lots more data about individual meters, including the states of the meters
Create meters screen now uses select drop-downs instead of text inputs for easier usability
Removed
No update
Changed
Hosted consent routes have stricter validation rules
Hosted consents older than 30 days are now considered expired if not completed
Fixed
Handle instance where you try to access a consent that is more than 30 days old and you get a 401
Adjusted token flows on the dashboard for a smoother experience
Today we are very excited to announce the release of our new Developer Dashboard. As avid users of API's ourselves, we know that creating an integration can be a total breeze or a total nightmare, depending on how much information you have at your fingertips. Our drive to make as much information available to you starts with surfacing information about all API requests you make to Openvolt.
The developer dashboard can show you all API requests you made to Openvolt in the past 12 months, allowing you to view endpoints, status codes and even error responses you received for API requests. It also shows the events that are being generated under the hood of the platform, allowing you to subscribe to these via webhooks or email. Our hope is that this will help developers design their integration on top of the Openvolt API and troubleshoot any issues that could arise.
We've also made further improvements to the dashboard to collate developer-focused tools all in one place, such as platform event triggers, team member management and api key rotation. Please hop into the dashboard and give it a try!
At Openvolt we are on a mission to create the best developer experience possible. As part of this we believe it’s critical to provide developers with insight into what is happening under the hood of the API. Specifically, if you want to trigger an action in your app when something happens (such as a backfill of data being completed), or know when your customers are doing some action (granting consent to a meter), we want to empower you with access to that information. For that reason we have created Events. An Event is a change on the Openvolt platform that is relevant to your application.
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An Event is a change on the Openvolt platform that is relevant to your application
We are starting off with exposing the following events
meter_data.received
meter.created
user.created
customer.created
api_keys.rotated
hosted_consent.approved
hosted_consent.revoked
Some events are better processed by people on your team (hosted_consent.revoked), while others should be automatically handled by your application (meter_data.received) You can subscribe to these events through either webhooks or email depending on your need.
To find out more about Events and how to get the best out of our platform, please check out our An introduction to Events
Other Updates
Added
Hosted consents now have a description field that can be used to provide more detail about a hosted consent
New evidence endpoint for hosted consents
Removed
Evidence field is now removed from the consent objects in favour of a specific endpoint
Deprecated
Changed
On consent flows, we renamed gb.domestic.specific to gb.residential.specific
We no longer send revocation emails when a consent is approved. End customers of our users can email [email protected] instead and we will process their request there
Fixed
Meter response now returns the full customer object where as before it was just the customer_id
With a smart or advanced meter penetration of over 60%, the UK now has over 35M of these meters deployed in the country. The vast majority of these meters are connected to the Smart DCC network, a government appointed entity tasked with ensuring the flow of data from the smart meters to industry participants such as energy retailers. Today we’re excited to announce that those meters can now be accessed through the Openvolt API.
This is a key unlock. The UK also has one of the most dynamic energy markets in Europe and, coupled with a vibrant ecosystem of startups building applications to tackle the energy transition, this new data source from Openvolt can help power those energy innovators to deliver new and exciting applications to their customers.
As we expand access to smart meters across Europe, one challenge that we’re tackling head on is ensuring that not only do we build the connectors into these central data sources, but that we also equip app developers with the workflows needed to secure the appropriate consent from their users to access their smart meter data. Each country and type of meter (residential or commercial) has a different set of consent requirements when accessing and storing customer data. Along with the connection into Smart DCC, we are also announcing the launch of Hosted Consents for the UK residential market. This means that Openvolt will take care of all the heavy lifting when it comes to collecting the correct set of consent information from your customer, regardless of country or meter type, with mobile optimized workflows and customizable branding.
Once we have received a valid consent from your app user, we will then be able to retrieve their half hourly electricity consumption data for the past 13 months and make this data available to you (either through our API or via webhook notifications). You can then focus on what you do best - building a great app experience for your customers!
To read more about UK Smart Meter connections and hosted consent, please read our developer guide
Other Updates
Added
UK Commercial Smart Meters will now only collect data if it has a valid hosted consent, you can check whether or not your meter is valid by looking at the valid property when fetching a meter.
Added meter.enabled to meters, this can be used to enable/disable meter programatically by developers and replaces an older meter.validity_state.is_disabled_by_user property.
Added meter.error_code. Initially this property will be nullbut in the coming weeks we'll be adding support for helping you to diagnose what has happened when we were not able to collect smart meter data. We will be providing more information on these error codes in the coming weeks.
Improved internal audit trail when changing a hosted consent on a meter.
Removed
Evidence files for hosted consent have been removed from being returned on the hosted consent object. The reason for this change was that in cases where you might query for hundreds of meters, if an evidence file was particularly large this would massively increase the side of a request.
To access the evidence for a hosted consent there is a new endpoint you can call:
/v1/hosted-consents/:id/evidences
Deprecated
To try and reduce duplication of information, the meter.validity_state property has been deprecated and will be removed in the second half of the year (not date set yet). Validity states will continue to be returned for any new meters, but we would encourage you to use other available properties on the meter to ensure your code will continue to work correctly.
Improve some status code responses to make them more reflective of the error (for example 422 on validation errors)
The meter.status property is no longer stored in our database, but virtually calculated from meter.enabled and meter.validwhich is to say, for a meter to be active it must be both valid and enabled by the user.
the /meters endpoint has had a few query parameters added and some taken away due to the above changes. You will no longer be able to query by any validity_state properties, but you will be able to query by these additional ones:
enabled
error_code
The logo property on account objects no longer contains the raw file data in order to reduce the size of api responses. This field will now contain a URL that can be called to retrieve this file data directly.
Fixed
Fixed an issue where, In rare cases, calling the API with invalid credentials may result in the request "hanging".
Webhook triggers should no longer be called if no data was received for a smart meter when being checked by Openvolt.
Fixed an issue whereby if adding a meter number that already exists on the platform we would not backfill the new meters data.
We are excited to announce our new Hosted Consents functionality, starting with UK Commercial meters. One of the main barriers to accessing Smart Meter Data across Europe is understanding the correct consent mechanism by jurisdiction, as well as managing the actual process of securing consent from the appropriate party. In addition, storing that consent such that it is easily accessible for audit purposes is a further administrative overhead. Current industry practice in the world of commercial and industrial meters involves collecting a signature from an authorized individual representing the energy consumer. This process is painful and often relies on manual tracking and follow up to secure a signed LOA.
Openvolt's solution is called Hosted Consent and we believe this can significantly simplify the administrative effort in securing and tracking consent. Accessible through the developer dashboard or the API, this solution allows you to generate a URL link you can send to your customers that brings them through a completely self branded flow to gain consent through a choice of three potential mechanisms
Upload a Letter of Authority (LoA), similar to what the industry is used to and useful where an LoA has already been received
New digital consent authorization functionality that negates the need for signing of PDFs
Forwarding a request for authorization to a different person
Hosted Consents for UK Commercial electricity flows. This replaces older consents and documents functionality with branded flows to remove friction when collecting and uploading consent information https://api.openvolt.com/v1/hosted-consents
New test meter numbers available in the live environment. Use numbers 9999999999999999999999999899999999999979999999999996 and 9999999999995 to simulate successful meters (more test meters to follow, simulating unsuccessful scenarios)
Netherlands half hourly consumption data for Commercial electricity meters (Private BETA)
Removed
consents and documents functionality is now replaced with hosted consents (see above). These APIs are no longer available
Deprecated
Openvolt Test Environment will be removed on the 15th April 2024. At this stage, you will no longer have access to the test environment in the dashboard and your test-api-key will no longer work. Please use the new test meter functionality (as described above). We hope this will reduce the complexity of simulating meters for your test development
meter.update_frequency will be removed on the 1st July 2024Data for all meters will be collected as soon as there is data available
Changed
From 15th April 2024 we will be enforcing consent checks on all meters. If your meter has a false value for either meter.validity_state.missing_consent or meter.validity_state.expired_consent then meter data will not be collected. Check the meter.valid value of your meters to ensure they are in a position to collect data
Fixed
api Improved retry functionality for UK Commercial & Residential meters
apiBug fix on meter.createdwhere there was one nested element too many
dashboard Fixes post consents --> hosted consents migration
