Overview

• Utility Website Updates: Made updates to adapt to significant changes on five utility websites, including a complete overhaul of Duke Energy’s portal and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) changes at three utilities.
• General Improvements: Increased authentication speed, reliability, and bill parsing quality across several utilities. A highlight here is that we can now authenticate customers of First Energy utilities in under 20 seconds with 88% reliability.

Check out our utility support page for detailed info on our coverage and reliability.

Utility Website Updates

Utilities are constantly updating their portals, so maintaining reliable utility data requires updates on our end to adapt. Here are the most significant utility changes in November:

• Duke Energy completely redesigned their portal and their Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) flow.
• PSE&G New Jersey changed their MFA flow and started prompting customers to set up additional MFA methods
• PECO added a new pop-up to push customers to enable MFA
• AES Ohio changed an authentication redirect
• DTE Energy added a captcha requirement during authentication

Maintaining solid MFA support is important as MFA now affects over 41% of US meters, and more utilities have been pushing their customers towards MFA (or requiring it) this year. Read more about How MFA/2FA Impacts Utility API Access on our blog.

General Improvements

In addition to handling utility website changes, we’ve been improving our system to broaden utility support and increase reliability and speed. Here are some highlights of what we’ve shipped in November:

• Improved authentication speed and reliability for PPL, Rhode Island Energy, and our seven supported First Energy utilities. These utilities present authentication challenges including captcha and other factors. We now authenticate in under 20 seconds, with 85% reliability for PPL and Rhode Island Energy and 88% for First Energy utilities.
• Improved bill parsing quality across multiple utilities including Georgia Power, DTE Energy, Dominion Energy Virginia, PECO, Evergy, and more
• Added support for interval data on business accounts within ComEd
• Fixed intermittent authentication failures at AES Ohio caused by the utility returning server errors after successful authentication
• Fixed issue where multiple accounts for the same customer led to duplicate bills
• Fixed bill parsing issue for Central Maine Power customers who have solar generation