Requirements and Limitations

The following data requirements and limitations apply to all utilities and customers in the High Bill Alert (non-AMI) Cloud Service. These requirements must be met for a utility and a customer to participate in the program.

Utility Data Requirements and Limitations

  • Scale: The minimum scale of the alerts is 30,000 customers. While there is no maximum scale limit, the actual scale of the alerts is affected by the number of customers whose estimated usage exceeds configured thresholds. The actual number of communications sent will also be affected by attrition, opt-outs, customer eligibility, and data availability.
  • Language: United States and Canadian English are the only locales and languages supported at this time.
  • Data Delivery Frequency: The utility must be able to send billing-based usage data to Oracle Utilities within one week of the customer's bill period ending.

Customer Requirements and Limitations

  • Billing Frequency: Customers must be on monthly billing cycles.
  • Service Points: Customers must have only a single service point per fuel type.
  • Data Requirements: Usage data and third-party weather data are required to estimate the customer's current usage and calculate a forecast for the rest of the bill period. In order to display cost information in the alert, utilities must send the billed usage amount in the billing data file, as described in the Oracle Utilities Opower Legacy Billing Data Transfer Standards. If the billed usage amount is not included, only energy usage information is displayed.
  • Data History: A minimum of 90% of the customer’s billed usage data from the previous 24 months is strongly preferred to ensure more accurate estimates and year-over-year comparisons. Customers with less than 24 months of billing data can receive the alert, though insights will be less complete, and more likely limited to month-over-month comparisons. A minimum of 90% of 13 months of historical data is required.
  • Supported Fuel Types: Electric and gas fuels are supported. Email messages are generated separately for each fuel type. There is no combined fuel version. For dual-fuel customers, a separate gas and electric version of the alert can be sent. However, most utilities choose to align the sending of the alerts on a seasonable basis (gas alerts during cold seasons, and electric alerts during warm seasons) to avoid overlapping communications. Your Oracle Utilities Opower Delivery Team will work with you to determine the best strategy for your program.
  • Communication Delivery: High Bill Alerts (non-AMI) may only be sent to customers during a specific time period of the current billing cycle. See Delivery for additional information.
  • Email Address: Customers must have a valid email address.
  • Email Clients: Oracle Utilities supports email clients that may be native to a specific device, such as the installed email client on the iPhone 6, as well as email client applications that may be accessed from any device or computer. Oracle Utilities supports and optimizes the following email clients to view High Bill Alerts (non-AMI):
    • iPhone internal email client (iOS 10.0 and greater)
    • iPad internal email client (iOS 10.0 and greater)
    • Apple Mail (Mac OS X 10.10 and greater)
    • Android internal email client
    • Microsoft Outlook (2010 and greater)
    • Outlook.com
    • Yahoo! Mail
    • Gmail.com
    • Samsung Mail

For email clients that support multiple versions operating at the same time (for example, Apple iOS10 on iPhone5 or Microsoft Outlook 2010, 2012, and 2013), Oracle Utilities generally supports the most current major release as well as a number of previous major releases. For email clients that only provide a single version (for example, Gmail.com), Oracle Utilities supports the currently available version. Other email clients are not officially supported or tested by Oracle Utilities. Customers viewing High Bill Alerts (non-AMI) on unsupported devices or applications may see user experience variations in their reports.