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Launching Hosted Consents for UK Commercial Smart Meters

April 9th, 2024 by openvolt

Tom Freeborough

Founding Engineer



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

Check out the https://docs.openvolt.com api for more details


Other Updates


Added

  • 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 9999999999999 9999999999998 9999999999997 9999999999996 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
  • dashboard Dashboard UI redesign