The Future of Energy Is Stuck at the Login Screen

You don’t have to look hard to find declarations on how AI will transform the consumer experience. Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, recently declared that AI will reinvent every customer experience.” Delta is leveraging AI to enhance its customers’ travel experience. In the healthcare sector, it’s being hailed as the next diagnostic breakthrough. 

But there’s one sector where AI can’t deliver on its promise to customers: utilities. Not because of technology. Not because of demand. But because access to utility data still sucks.

The future of utility customer experience might be AI-enabled  — but right now, it’s stuck at the login screen.

Apple’s Home App Pilot: A Glimpse of What’s Possible — and What’s Broken

Let’s take, for example, Apple’s announced pilot with Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), which allows residential customers to view their daily energy usage, compare it over time, and receive rate recommendations—all within iOS. It’s a powerful example of how consumer technology can transform how utility customers interact with their data.  

But here’s the catch: the entire experience hinges on a custom integration with PG&E. 

Absent custom integrations with the nation’s 3,000 other electric utilities, this new feature remains a local pilot project. No national scale. No  “Hey Siri, keep my electricity costs low this month.” 

The barrier isn’t a lack of demand; it’s a lack of access to the customer’s utility data.

To be clear, PG&E deserves credit. They have a functional data connection platform,  especially compared to its peers nationwide. But to unlock the AI-driven, consumer-centric future of energy, we need more than a few one-off pilots. We need infrastructure that connects innovators, both within and outside the utility, to the data they need whenever they need it, without compromising privacy and security.

The State of Utility Data Access

Like I said earlier, the state of utility data access sucks. It’s better than it was a decade ago, but that’s a pretty low bar. 

On one side, you have permission-based screen scraping, a quick-to-market solution that can be implemented anywhere a customer account portal is available. Multiple companies have raised capital on the idea that, using screen scrapers, they can become” the Plaid of energy” with this method. But let’s not confuse scrapers with scalable infrastructure. Plaid’s early momentum may have been built on scrapers, but their long-term success has been built on relationships and direct integrations with financial institutions. That’s what enabled scale, trust, and performance. 

Screen scrapers are a fragile solution that fails when a website changes. They create a clunky user experience. And yes, AI might help make scrapers a little better — but we are kidding ourselves if we think it’s a long-term foundation to build upon.

On the other side, a handful of utilities have released “Green Button APIs” to the market. When these APIs exist and are usable, they represent a big step forward. However, many of them aren’t usable. Many of them don’t meet the Green Button Standard. And all of them were built in response to a “Green Button” mandate with limited capabilities for basic usage data.

Don’t believe me? In Hawaii — one of the country’s most dynamic clean energy markets —  Hawaiian Electric’s Green Button API, launched in 2021, has zero users as of January 1, 2025. 

At the dawn of the AI era, these data access solutions aren’t transformational; they aren’t even in the game.

What We’re Scaling Instead 

At UtilityAPI, with support from the Department of Energy (DOE) we started just like everyone else — scraping data and trying to integrate with the scattered Green Button APIs to meet market demand. And yes, we will continue to do both when needed. But we have also realized that if these remain the only two solutions in our toolbox, we and the industry will be hosed.

So we built something new: Utility Data Exchange — or UDX. 

UDX is not another scraper. It’s not a compliance check box. It’s the solution that transforms the Apple-PG&E pilot into a standard iOS offering nationwide. UDX is the infrastructure layer that the utility and market need to transform the utility customer experience from top to bottom. With a UDX integrated, 

• A customer can enroll in a local VPP program with a single click.
• A winning utility vendor can connect thousands of customer accounts and their data.
• A large enterprise account can pull multi-site data through a single API, eliminating the need to navigate 10 different portals or contact their account representative.

Since quietly releasing UDX, 23 utilities have integrated it into their systems, providing the market with access to over 15 million meters.  Yes, many of those deployments were tied to Green Button mandates — we’ll take them and future ones. But thanks to AI, the market is evolving too fast to wait for regulators everywhere. We’re building for scale, not compliance. 

Why this moment matters: Data Drives Change

UtilityAPI is the only company in the sector working with both sides of the utility data market. We integrate directly with utilities. We serve solution providers, energy innovators, and enterprises that require data. We are the infrastructure that connects utility customers to the energy services of the future.

That gives us a front-row seat to what’s possible — and how much value is still trapped.  But we can’t do it alone.

Utilities, we will connect you to your customers and their solution providers that want to work with you on this problem. 

Innovators, we will open the doors for you to talk collaboratively with utilities about solutions that can be scaled today. 

Advocates, legislators, and regulators, we will work with you to enable these benefits cost-effectively. Let me know how we can help.

Investors join us on this multi-billion-dollar journey and invest in the only company doing what Plaid did, at scale.

Join the Movement

After 11 years of hard-earned lessons and validation from some of the world’s largest consumer brands, I can confidently say two things: 

First, clean energy is here. It’s dominant. And no matter how hard the guy in the White House tries, it’s only up and to the right from here. 

Second, the only way to transform the utility sector and lower energy costs is by connecting utilities and the market through modern, secure data connections. 

That’s why we built UDX. That’s why we’re scaling rapidly. And that’s why we are inviting the entire ecosystem to stop working around each other — and start working together.

Let’s go.