Opower Platform Supports Green Button Connect Integration

Utility customers can securely share their energy usage data with authorized third-party applications through the Green Button Connect (GBC) Integration with the Opower Platform. Utilities need to share their customers' data easily and securely in a scalable manner with legally contracted partners. In many states, regulation mandates that utilities provide a "share my data" solution for their customers. Utility IT resource constraints make it challenging to build and manage a solution on their own.

Opower has partnered with UtilityAPI, a GBC solution provider, to enable utilities to offer data sharing functionality to their customers. UtilityAPI manages the partnerships with the third-party providers that customers want to share data with. Opower's single sign-on (SSO) and GraphQL API enables UtilityAPI to easily access utility data in line with the GBC My Data specification on behalf of the third parties that utility customers would like to share with. In this arrangement, Oracle Utilities Opower acts as a platform for authentication and authorization as well as a data provider through Opower's external GraphQL API.

Supported authorization patterns include:

  • Consumer Authorization: Once a utility customer has granted access to one or more third parties, the Utility API retrieve the customer's data on behalf of the third party at a pre-determined cadence (for example, daily, weekly, monthly) using customer-level access tokens.
  • On-behalf-of Authorization: With the authorization of the utility customer, a Customer Service Representative may login on behalf of a customer to authorize or revoke access of their data by a third-party. The Opower Customer Service Interface has masquerading functionality which allows Customer Service Representatives to log in to the Opower Web portal or view of Opower Widget Gallery on behalf of a selected customer. In 24C, the masquerading login functionality of the Opower Customer Service Interface was expanded to include third-party partner applications.

Utilities can use this solution to securely share customer data with legally contracted partners, and allow legally contracted partner applications to use Opower as a data provider through Opower's external GraphQL API. 

Steps to Enable

Contact your Service Delivery Manager to coordinate configuration of the module. To contact your Service Delivery Manager:

  1. Log in to Inside Opower (https://inside.opower.com). This is your portal for questions and information related to your program.
  2. Go to the Community tab and contact the Service Delivery Manager using the information provided.

Tips And Considerations

No additional integration is needed for utilities that already send Oracle Utilities Opower customer data.

Key Resources