September 15, 2022 Supercharge your energy platform with Eliq’s innovative and easy-to-use APIs Olof Hartelius, our CTO and Co-Founder, explains How, and Why A Developer Portal, why? We founded Eliq a little over 7 years ago, time flies… Our goal was to be the guiding star to help homeowners to know what they should do about energy use in their own homes. Six years later, that still feels very current We do this by helping energy providers and other companies to build products that their customers can use to optimise household energy consumption. Our system helps to analyse millions of data points about users’ energy consumption and helps them to reduce consumption and take an active part in the energy transition. It is underpinned by machine learning analytics and increasingly advanced A.I. (artificial intelligence) systems. This is where the Developer Portal comes in. Our platform makes it easy for product teams to equip their apps with tried-and-tested formulas, and access an array of cutting-edge features and powerful API Insights that can help households to save energy. The Developer Portal is the tool where product teams can learn about the Eliq platform, draw inspiration from sample implementations and start building their first apps. For those who don’t know, how can your APIs be used? How much time do you have..? Typically, to use the Eliq platform, a client needs to share data on their users with us. Different clients have different types of data and they upload it to our platform via one of our Application Programming Interfaces or APIs. What kinds of data? To understand the true power of the Eliq platform, let’s look at a few different examples. End customer data could be a pseudonymised user id connected to an end user. Location data such as postcodes or a pseudonymised location id. Electricity and gas consumption data. How much energy is actually being used? Tariff information is associated with the meter to display analytics in the correct currency. Home profile information. Enabling the Eliq data engine to further analyse consumption and provide targeted energy-saving advice, and enable comparison the usage to similar households. We enrich the data by adding in lots of other data sources, such as weather data and energy market data, so that we can provide clever insights about why energy use is rising or falling. We then give that back via our Insights API. The idea is to provide intelligent and targeted insights regarding energy consumption, based on multiple and enriched data sources. That means there is a lot of data being transported back and forth to our system, and we are helping our clients and their customers to gain more insights from it.Application Programming Interface. Has the Developer Portal evolved in response to a market need? Yes and No. Increasingly, utilities and other energy providers want to transition to being service providers and, to do that, they need to build closer relationships with their customers, so they can offer more services and be relevant in the future. They are evolving to do more than just sell kilowatt-hours. That is a trend that we’ve seen growing in the last couple of years, and it’s picking up rapidly. As a company, we have always aimed to be Developer Centric and we truly believe that ‘Your Developers deserve the best’. As cheesy as that might sound, we believe it to be true. We all need to pull together, especially during the current energy crisis, and the more we can provide when it comes to the building of different energy optimisation solutions, the better. The need for transparency regarding energy usage is not only a question for utilities. The Eliq platform is built with market diversity in mind, and the solutions we offer are just as applicable to B2B organisations as B2C, across different segments, as long as there is a will to provide clear insights about energy consumption and provide targeted energy-saving advice. The Developer Portal is a key part of this approach, it’s the place to go for anyone who wants to build the next big thing in energy. What is actually in the Developer Portal? The aim is to be an A-Z of Eliq’s products and functions. This includes guides and documentation on our different features, like the comparison to similar homes module, but also on our products and how to use them; examples of how our APIs can be used, to spark new ideas; and we also provide the ability to test our API. The idea is that this can help two main groups of people. First, the developers who will actually build the apps and systems that our customers rely on. They need deep technical information. The second group is product managers, who may not do the technical work of software development but still need to understand and also see how Eliq could help them. We also use it to keep people updated about what we currently offer and our latest releases. Will this change how you communicate with clients? No. We released the Developer Portal with the mindset that it should be a centre point where one can go to find out information, access API documentation and become inspired by use cases. It also gives you the option to test your ideas directly in a sandbox environment. We want to work closely with our clients, and we’re only one call or email away to provide support and ensure we’re meeting their needs. Client experience is always a priority to us, and our new Developer portal is an example of just that. We can see how this would help utilities develop energy platforms to help their customers understand their energy use. How does it help others? Good question. We can also work with smart home developers to make buildings more efficient. We want to provide the building blocks that those customers can use so that they can understand what to do with our API and pair that with their own solutions. We are constantly expanding our horizons and I would highly recommend that you watch this space.. We are also making sure everything is documented and presented in a nice way. It will continue to evolve of course, but that user experience is vital. Is the portal currently up and running? Yes! We have been testing this ahead of the official launch. For example, we hosted a Hackathon together with the Mechanical Engineering Society at Imperial College in London, at the start of the summer. This helped us to see what is possible to build with our API, and give us the confidence that it is up and running. We are now super-excited to show it off to our other clients and future partners, as we’re sure it will prove to be valuable. 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