1. Documentation
2. Utilities
3. PCE

Peninsula Clean Energy

Description: Peninsula Clean Energy (PCE) is a Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) utility in the California bay area.

Website: https://www.peninsulacleanenergy.com/data-connect/

Utility ID: PCE (this is the utility identifier you use in our API)

Third Party Registration

In order for you to request data from PCE customers, you must register with PCE as a third party company.

As part of their Green Button Connect My Data program, PCE is using UtilityAPI's EE/DER Engagement Platform to allow third-party companies to request data access from PCE customers. Authorizations use the Green Button OAuth process, which means that third-parties have to be pre-registered with PCE so they can be assigned a client_id.

Data Access

After registering with PCE as a third party, to request authorizations from PCE customers and test accounts, you can use any of these methods:

• Option 1: When you Request Data from your dashboard, select Peninsula Clean Energy in the utility dropdown.
• Option 2: Using your default Template, set the Utility ID to PCE in the url parameter or when you create a Form.
• Option 3: The Green Button OAuth process using the PCE OAuth Authorize Endpoint found in your OAuth settings.

Once a customer has authorized, you will see an Authorization appear on your dashboard and via both our JSON API and Green Button API.

Sandbox Mode

When your first register as a third party, your registration status is set to Sandbox mode. This means you can only request data from test accounts, so you can try it out or start building an integration, but real customers won't be able to authorize data sharing with you yet. PCE will review your registration, then you'll get an email letting you know that you can now switch your status to Live mode in your settings.

Authentication Options

During the OAuth authorization flow, we offer multiple ways that customers can look up their PCE account. To make things smoother for the customer, you can pre-fill these lookup identifiers (phone number, email, etc.) in the OAuth scope string if you already know it. We'll automatically try to find that user using your provided information so they can skip the lookup step of authentication and go directly to the OTP sending step. If we can't find that user automatically given your prefilled value, we'll fall back using the default authentication flow.

Scope parameter format:
auth-{type}[-{value}]

Full scope string example with authentication option (percent encoded):
scope=FB%3D4_16_51%3BAdditionalScope%3Dauth-phone-1111111111

Test Credentials

The PCE OAuth authorization flow doesn't use usernames or passwords by default. Instead it asks the user to lookup their account via some identifier (e.g. phone number, address, etc.), then sends them a One-Time-Passcode (OTP) to verify their identity.

That means you can't use UtilityAPI's default test usernames to manually simulate a test scenario. Instead, below we have created test identifiers so you can simulate authorizing as an PCE user under various test scenarios.

When you use these test identifiers, we won't actually send an OTP. Instead we will display it directly on the authentication page so you can enter it while you're testing. If you'd like to see what the sent OTP messages look like, use the OTP Testing guide.

Try one with your PCE data share link
(you aren't logged into an account that has a registered PCE client)

Test Phone Numbers

Test Emails

Test Addresses

Test Account Numbers

OTP Testing

If you want to send a one-time passcode to a real phone number or email to see what it looks like, you can prefix a special string to your phone number or email during lookup time and we'll set that number as the test scenario's OTP contact method. NOTE: These are intended for manual testing and not for automated testing (since they will really send an OTP), so please use our test credentials or the /test-submit API for automated tests.

Demo Third Party

To demonstrate how you can integrate the GBC OAuth authorization process into your apps and websites, we offer a demo third party website that can be configured with any GBC client, so long as it has a specific redirect_uri added. We have also created public, sandbox-only GBC clients that you can try out (see table below).