Find Your Customer's Utility

Find Your Customer's Utility

The first step we recommend is determining your customer's utility. Most homes and businesses know their utility, even if they don't know their specific tariff rate plan. We collect electricity utility and tariff data across the USA, Canada, and Mexico, including investor-owned utilities, municipalities, and cooperatives.

At Arcadia:

• We maintain data on which utilities operate in specific locations using Territories that define utility service areas.
• We track all tariff rate plans that each utility offers, including the number of customers on each plan and whether it's the default option. Currently, we have tariffs for approximately 98% of customers in the countries we cover.

The easiest way to find available utilities for your customer is by searching with their postal code or zip code. Here's an example using our office location:

GET /rest/public/lses?zipCode=94105&country=US&residentialServiceTypes=ELECTRICITY

Key points about this request:

• Always include the ISO Country Code along with your customer's zip code to ensure relevant results. Some countries have matching zip codes.
• The residentialServiceTypes=ELECTRICITY parameter ensures you only retrieve Load Serving Entities (LSEs) that serve electricity to residential customers.
• Without residentialServiceTypes=ELECTRICITY, you would retrieve solar providers and other non-electricity LSEs from the database.
• The commercialServiceTypes and industrialServiceTypes parameters are available for commercial and industrial customers, respectively.

This request returns the following response:

{  
    "status": "success",  
    "count": 3,  
    "type": "LoadServingEntity",  
    "results": [  
        {  
            "lseId": 1074,  
            "name": "San Francisco City & County of",  
            "code": "16612",  
            "websiteHome": "http://www.sfgov.org/index.asp"  
        },  
        {  
            "lseId": 734,  
            "name": "Pacific Gas & Electric Co",  
            "code": "14328",  
            "websiteHome": "http://www.pge.com/"  
        },  
        {  
            "lseId": 100773,  
            "name": "CleanPowerSF",  
            "code": "",  
            "websiteHome": "http://sfwater.org/index.aspx"  
        }  
    ],  
    "pageCount": 25,  
    "pageStart": 0  
}

Analyzing this response reveals several insights:

• Three different utilities are returned for zip code 94105 (San Francisco, California), as indicated by the count field value. Customers in this area may have three utilities to choose from. This can occur for the following reasons:
  • The zip code could be located on the border of two or more electricity service areas, and service area boundaries don't map exactly to zip code boundaries. We work diligently to ensure our zip code to utility mapping is accurate and up-to-date.
  • The location might be in an area with utility choice, which typically occurs in deregulated markets or community choice aggregation markets.

The lseId is the primary field we're trying to identify. It's a unique Arcadia ID (primary key) for each Load Serving Entity returned. Once you know the lseId for a utility, you can use it in many other APIs as a filter for records tied to that utility. We'll use this lseId in the next step to find matching tariffs for a specific utility.

What if a Recognizable Utility Isn't Returned?

Occasionally, no recognizable utilities will be returned by your zip code search. This may happen because the zip code you provided isn't valid or the utility's name has changed. While this is rare, it's important to be aware of this possibility.

If your utility search using a zip code or address is unsuccessful, you have two options.

First, you can search by utility code if known. Use the search and searchOn parameters:

GET /rest/public/lses?country=US&residentialServiceTypes=ELECTRICITY&search=16612&searchOn=code

Alternatively, you can search by the utility name. If you know the utility name likely contains "San Francisco," you can search like this:

GET /rest/public/lses?country=US&residentialServiceTypes=ELECTRICITY&search=San%20Francisco&searchOn=name

Note that we replaced the space in "San Francisco" with "%20," resulting in the final search parameter "San%20Francisco." This is called URL encoding.

Either of these requests will return the same response:

{  
    "status": "success",  
    "count": 1,  
    "type": "LoadServingEntity",  
    "results": [  
        {  
            "lseId": 1074,  
            "name": "San Francisco City & County of",  
            "code": "16612",  
            "websiteHome": "http://www.sfgov.org/index.asp"  
        }  
    ],  
    "pageCount": 25,  
    "pageStart": 0  
}

If neither option provides the expected utility, you can contact our support team.

Getting More Details About the Utility

Our API calls offer an option to return a minimum, standard, or extended set of data in the response. In the previous API call to retrieve local utilities, the standard response fields were sufficient to find our utility (and our customer's) PG&E. However, if we had included the optional argument fields=ext, an extended set of information about each utility would have been returned.

GET /rest/public/lses?zipCode=94105&country=US&residentialServiceTypes=ELECTRICITY&fields=ext

This request generates the following response:

{  
    "status": "success",  
    "count": 3,  
    "type": "LoadServingEntity",  
    "results": [  
        {  
            "lseId": 1074,  
            "name": "San Francisco City & County of",  
            "lseCode": "CCOSF",  
            "code": "16612",  
            "websiteHome": "http://www.sfgov.org/index.asp",  
            "offeringType": "Bundle",  
            "ownership": "MUNI",  
            "serviceTypes": "ELECTRICITY",  
            "totalRevenues": 101620,  
            "totalSales": 992877,  
            "totalCustomers": 2173,  
            "residentialServiceTypes": "ELECTRICITY",  
            "residentialRevenues": 12,  
            "residentialSales": 53,  
            "residentialCustomers": 21,  
            "commercialServiceTypes": "ELECTRICITY",  
            "commercialRevenues": 94177,  
            "commercialSales": 860564,  
            "commercialCustomers": 2150,  
            "industrialServiceTypes": "ELECTRICITY",  
            "industrialRevenues": 912,  
            "industrialSales": 28067,  
            "industrialCustomers": 1,  
            "transportationServiceTypes": "ELECTRICITY",  
            "transportationRevenues": 6519,  
            "transportationSales": 104193,  
            "transportationCustomers": 1,  
            "billingPeriodRepresentation": {  
                "fromDateOffset": 0,  
                "toDateOffset": 0,  
                "style": "Unknown"  
            }  
        },  
        {  
            "lseId": 734,  
            "name": "Pacific Gas & Electric Co",  
            "lseCode": "PGE",  
            "code": "14328",  
            "websiteHome": "http://www.pge.com/",  
            "offeringType": "Bundle",  
            "ownership": "INVESTOR",  
            "serviceTypes": "ELECTRICITY",  
            "totalRevenues": 12615980,  
            "totalSales": 72481825,  
            "totalCustomers": 5069189,  
            "residentialServiceTypes": "ELECTRICITY",  
            "residentialRevenues": 4969233,  
            "residentialSales": 27558981,  
            "residentialCustomers": 4453034,  
            "commercialServiceTypes": "ELECTRICITY",  
            "commercialRevenues": 5057946,  
            "commercialSales": 27109514,  
            "commercialCustomers": 526484,  
            "industrialServiceTypes": "ELECTRICITY",  
            "industrialRevenues": 2588801,  
            "industrialSales": 17813330,  
            "industrialCustomers": 89671,  
            "transportationServiceTypes": "ELECTRICITY",  
            "transportationRevenues": 0,  
            "transportationSales": 0,  
            "transportationCustomers": 0,  
            "billingPeriodRepresentation": {  
                "fromDateOffset": 0,  
                "toDateOffset": -1,  
                "style": "InclusiveToDate"  
            }  
        },  
        {  
            "lseId": 100773,  
            "name": "CleanPowerSF",  
            "lseCode": "CPSF",  
            "code": "",  
            "websiteHome": "http://sfwater.org/index.aspx",  
            "offeringType": "Energy",  
            "ownership": "COOP",  
            "serviceTypes": "ELECTRICITY",  
            "totalRevenues": 1,  
            "totalSales": 1,  
            "totalCustomers": 1,  
            "residentialServiceTypes": "ELECTRICITY",  
            "residentialRevenues": 1,  
            "residentialSales": 1,  
            "residentialCustomers": 1,  
            "commercialServiceTypes": "ELECTRICITY",  
            "commercialRevenues": 1,  
            "commercialSales": 1,  
            "commercialCustomers": 1,  
            "industrialServiceTypes": "ELECTRICITY",  
            "industrialRevenues": 1,  
            "industrialSales": 1,  
            "industrialCustomers": 1,  
            "transportationServiceTypes": "ELECTRICITY",  
            "transportationRevenues": 1,  
            "transportationSales": 1,  
            "transportationCustomers": 1,  
            "billingPeriodRepresentation": {  
                "fromDateOffset": 0,  
                "toDateOffset": -1,  
                "style": "InclusiveToDate"  
            }  
        }  
    ],  
    "pageCount": 25,  
    "pageStart": 0  
}

Note the additional detail this response contains. By analyzing this response, we can learn the following information about the returned utilities.

Each utility has a different ownership type:

Other potential ownership values include: FEDERAL, POLITICAL_SUBDIVISION, RETAIL_ENERGY_MARKETER, WHOLESALE_ENERGY_MARKETER, TRANSMISSION, and STATE.

Now that we know how to find the utility our customer uses, it's time to learn how to find the exact tariff that applies to our customer!