Community Solar Energy Allocation and Billing Integration
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Solution Overview
Problem
Customers subscribing to renewable energy sources face difficulties in tracking and understanding the savings and environmental impacts of their subscription, due to separate billing and documentation requirements for traditional and renewable energy sources.
Innovation Solution
A method that retrieves historic utility bill statements to determine a customer's energy usage rate and eligibility for a community solar energy generating system, dynamically managing energy allocation and providing transparent data records on energy credits and usage via a server and communication network.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of information
If customers separately subscribe to renewable energy sources and traditional utility companies, then customers can access both renewable energy and traditional energy supply, but customers receive separate bills and separate information regarding energy consumption and generation, making it difficult to track savings and environmental impacts
Solution Approach 1:
The patent combines separate billing systems and information tracking for renewable energy and traditional utility services into a single integrated billing system. This consolidation merges previously separate customer accounts, billing statements, and energy tracking into one unified interface, allowing customers to view all energy consumption, generation, credits, and savings in a single consolidated bill rather than managing multiple separate bills and documentation systems.
2Reliability
If customers subscribe to renewable energy sources separately from traditional utility companies, then customers can support renewable energy generation, but customers have to provide sufficient documentation to achieve savings and frequently struggle to determine what savings and environmental impacts their subscription is providing
Solution Approach 1:
The system implements self-service functionality by automatically calculating energy credits, savings, and environmental impacts without requiring customers to manually track or document their renewable energy subscriptions. The integrated billing system automatically monitors energy generation from renewable sources, applies appropriate credits to utility bills, and provides real-time information about savings and environmental benefits, eliminating the need for customers to gather and submit documentation.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent incorporates feedback mechanisms that provide customers with real-time information about their energy consumption, renewable energy generation, credits applied, and environmental impacts. The system continuously monitors and communicates savings information, allowing customers to see the direct impact of their renewable energy subscriptions on their bills and the environment, thereby improving both reliability of savings calculation and ease of understanding.
Data Source
AI summary
Implementations of the disclosed subject matter may provide a method of retrieving a data record including historic utility bill statements of a customer, determining a historic energy usage rate of the customer based on the retrieved data record, and determining whether the customer is eligible to subscribe to a community solar energy generating system based on geographic location of the community solar energy generating system, the determined historic energy usage rate of the customer, and the customer's geographic location. The method may determine an allocation of energy produced by the community solar energy generating system when the eligible customer is enrolled in a subscription to the community solar energy generating system. The method may generate a customer data record for the user based on credits for the allocation of energy of the community solar energy generating system and receiving energy from another energy generating system.