Bayou Energy announces New Mexico utility support ahead of state community solar launch

In preparation for New Mexico’s community solar launch, Bayou Energy is excited to announce instant utility data access for PNM (Public Service Company of New Mexico) and El Paso Electric customers in addition to existing support for Xcel Energy, the parent company for the state’s Southwestern Public Service Company.

With the imminent launch of New Mexico’s community solar program, community solar project developers and subscriber management organizations will be preparing for enrollment, billing and support of thousands of customers across New Mexico’s three electric utilities. These customer operations require accessing end customer utility data through a collection of methods that result in a difficult tradeoff between customer experience and internal effort. With Bayou Energy’s Data product now supporting New Mexico’s electric utilities, community solar organizations can greatly simplify PNM, El Paso Electric and Xcel Energy customer utility data access and their market entry with just a few clicks or lines of code.

For community solar companies, customer utility data access normally involves some combination of collecting customer utility bills, requesting data from utilities or building software to collect end customer permission, utility credentials and fetching their utility data from the utility on their behalf. Requesting customer utility bills requires customers to log into their utility portal to download and share bill(s) that must then either be manually parsed or run through a coded utility bill scraper that must be newly developed and maintained for each utility. Requesting data from utilities often requires customers to fill out lengthy forms and then returns customer utility data one to 14 weeks later in a dirty format that requires manual effort or code to parse. Building software to collect customer permission, credentials and fetching their utility data is a time intensive engineering effort that must be repeated for each utility and kept up to date.

Bayou Energy’s Data product enables companies to give their customers a one-click clean energy experience across many utilities including PNM, El Paso Electric and Xcel Energy.

After a quick setup by a community solar company, customers can be guided to connect their utility accounts either by sharing their utility credentials or uploading their utility bill(s). Bayou then instantly returns their utility data for use in enrollment and provides community solar bill credits when available for use during customer support calls and to effectively bill customers.

Companies new to Bayou Energy can create an account online and get started by onboarding up to 10 customers free. For existing Bayou customers, PNM and El Paso Electric have been added to the product’s existing utility support.