In November 2024, Palmetto’s Energy Intelligence API — then only available to beta users — powered the winning team at MIT’s 10th Annual Climate & Energy Hack. Today, we’re excited to share that the Energy Intelligence API is available to all users, everywhere. In addition, we’re launching a suite of full-stack applications built on top of our Energy Intelligence software, so that we can meet our partners where they are — wherever that is.
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The Energy Intelligence API
As a tech company that has undergone significant change over the last decade, Palmetto recognizes a powerful truth: developers are key to innovation. We've built our Energy Intelligence API from the ground up with developers in mind, creating a flexible, easy-to-use tool for understanding and driving change in residential energy data.
In developing the API, we created a solution that could power the full scope of challenges that individuals and businesses face in the residential energy revolution. Palmetto runs multiple value-added businesses — financing, selling, installing, servicing — so our software had many challenges to address. In addition, we recognize that it’s critical for homeowners to trust information they’re given about their energy decision-making. A single tool that can power many applications ensures continuity across conversations, maintaining trust and helping homeowners feel confident moving forward with energy decisions big and small.
Developers can sign up for the API here and receive their first 500 calls free of charge every month. Enabling access is key to our ability to continue learning what builders really need as they tackle energy-related technical problems. As of today, the API already stands out due to its comprehensive capabilities and unique differentiators:
- Digital twins and physics simulations: Generic, one-size-fits-all recommendations fail to earn trust and drive action. The Energy Intelligence API sits on top of a sophisticated Building Energy Modeling simulation engine, finely tuned to provide detailed results for individual homes. At its core, the software leverages a digital twin approach to model whole-home energy consumption based on building attributes, occupancy, and weather. Evaluating home energy efficiency is inherently complex, requiring an understanding of thermal dynamics, HVAC performance, and weather interactions. Palmetto’s team of Energy Intelligence engineers embed deep building science and geospatial expertise into the software.
- Works with just an address: The model adapts to varying levels of available information, from a simple address to detailed home specifications. The geospatial layer queries a waterfall of datasets to retrieve key building characteristics that drive energy use, and probabilistic sampling from the more than one terabyte we’ve collected over the last ten years allows us to fill in any gaps. Users are also allowed to override the value of any attribute. User-provided values always take precedence over the model's initial estimates, and providing a known value for any attribute may also modify the probabilities associated with other attribute values.
- Calibration for enhanced accuracy: The model can be calibrated using historical consumption and production actuals to improve accuracy. Whether one prior utility bill is known or more, that added signal is used to weight and resample, aligning inferred energy use better with any known readings.
- Powerful "what-if" scenario simulation for more than 60 potential home upgrades: The API's true strength lies in its ability to simulate the impact of potential building upgrades. By passing in information about solar, storage, in-home devices, and building properties, developers can gain valuable intelligence about various "what-if" scenarios. The API considers over 60 different building attributes of any residential building in the US, allowing users to simulate specific upgrades, such as certain device-specific characteristics. When multiple upgrades are considered simultaneously, our approach overcomes the limitations of simple additive models by accounting for complex thermodynamic interactions between building upgrades and their effects across different energy uses.
- Granularity and disaggregation to end use: The model predicts bottom-up, so that estimates are available at an hourly level, disaggregated by fuel type and across end uses such as heating, cooling, and base equipment load.
- Proprietary data advantage: Our algorithms are trained and validated on massive volumes of granular data, including proprietary data collected over Palmetto’s more than ten years serving customers in the energy space.
- Comprehensive insights: Beyond basic energy usage, the API provides insights into bill size and climate impact. Integrations with rates, tariffs, and carbon emissions data enable accurate estimates of utility costs, forecasted savings from energy upgrades, and carbon footprint, providing homeowners with clear financial and environmental insights.
- Coverage: The software covers all of the United States housing stock, including a wide range of housing types: single-family detached and attached homes, as well as individual units within multi-family buildings ranging from duplexes to large apartment complexes (2 to 50+ units), and mobile homes.
- Developer-friendly design: We understand the needs of developers. The API comes with friendly API docs, an interactive demo, quick-start recipes, and free usage up to 500 successful API calls per month. In addition, results are fast: GPU acceleration allows for real-time inference.
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Our Full-Stack Solutions
A key tenet of our process is to meet people where they are. When it comes to developers, that means building the most comprehensive, easy-to-use energy intelligence toolkit on the market. When it comes to non-technical partners, that means providing full-stack applications that cater to a variety of personas in the energy space. To start, we’re launching two solutions on top of the API that are built for businesses to solve problems with their sales funnels: the Lead Prioritization Tool helps identify and recommend actions for a sales team’s highest-value leads, and the Quote Tool enables sellers to effectively convert those leads at lower cost.
Lead Prioritization Tool
Palmetto’s Energy Intelligence Lead Prioritization Tool requires only an address to provide instant insight into how much effort a sales team should invest into a given lead relative to the rest of their potential customer base. The solution harnesses the Energy Intelligence superpower of identifying key energy-related attributes of a home, predicting potential savings under a range of upgrade scenarios, and converting those indicators into an easy-to-digest lead score. Sellers use this product to disqualify leads with low expected revenue or low probability to convert, to increase the focus they put on high-value leads, and to inform the conversations they have with customers, providing valuable talking points such as recommended upgrades and expected utility cost savings. Future development may enable the product to automatically integrate into direct outreach campaigns, further simplifying the lift to action on high-value leads.
Quote Tool
Palmetto’s Energy Intelligence Quote Tool is built for early-stage customer conversations. By leveraging the Energy Intelligence software to estimate energy savings for a home upgrade or set of upgrades and integrating with other industry APIs to gather data about incentives and financing, the tool automatically creates a detailed, easy-to-consume quote that presents the total financial impact of going solar, replacing an HVAC system, or completing any other energy-related home improvement project. If the customer is considering solar, Palmetto’s Energy Intelligence Instant Design is leveraged to include an AI-powered visual representation of the PV system on the home.
Energy Advisor
Palmetto’s own website is powered by Energy Intelligence, which is at the heart of its consumer Energy Advisor experience. With only an address and the option to override any important energy-related details about their home, homeowners can receive a virtual energy assessment providing guidance into the most cost-effective options for lowering their utility bills and carbon impact.
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Backed by Expertise: Our Dedicated Team
Palmetto has recently underscored its commitment to this critical area by promoting Michael Bratsafolis to President of Energy Intelligence. This strategic move highlights our deep focus on empowering the energy transition through cutting-edge data and technology. Michael joined Palmetto nearly three years ago after spending eight years at tech giant Twilio, a company renowned for its developer-first API products. He brings inspiration from their success, not only in his commitment to serving software developers but also in how he thinks about leveraging insights from API usage to develop products for others who might benefit from the technology.
“With an API product, you get incredible insight into the demand and the market.”
— Michael Bratsafolis, to TechCrunch
Behind Michael stands a team of experts in building energy modeling, physical sciences, and geospatial data intelligence. This team has evolved out of the engineering team from Mapdwell, an MIT-spinoff startup that Palmetto acquired in 2021. In addition to Mapdwell, engineers and scientists have previous experience at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), graduate research studies in GIS and smart cities, and energy-adjacent consumer tech companies such as Opower and Uber.
What’s Next?
Palmetto is committed to fostering innovation within the developer community. We were proud to sponsor last year's Climate & Energy Hackathon at MIT, where students were among the first outside of Palmetto to work with our API. Innovative applications at the hackathon included using the API to estimate energy usage for multi-family buildings and compare them to Building Performance Standards, as well as designing an index score evaluating the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of setting up microgrids. Building on this momentum, we're excited to announce that we are co-hosting the SF Climate Week hackathon in April alongside fellow API climate startups Bayou Energy, Texture, and Shovels.AI, as well as venture capital supporters Stepchange and Virta Ventures.
Signups are still open for both in-person and virtual participation.
Ready to Build the Future of Energy?
Palmetto's Energy Intelligence API provides developers with the most flexible tool in the energy toolbox, giving them the power they need to build innovative solutions for a more sustainable future. Whether you're developing applications for homeowners, utilities, or beyond, our API offers the flexibility and depth of data to drive meaningful change. Sign up for free limited access today and start exploring the possibilities.
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Emily PastewkaVice President Data and AIIn her role as VP of Data & AI, Emily leads the science & engineering teams responsible for both internal business analytics and external data products. She brings years of experience working with energy data at Opower, solving large-scale marketplace data problems at Uber, and managing consumer data products at circular economy pioneer Rent the Runway. Emily holds a Masters of Science in Machine Learning from Columbia University, where she spent 3 additional years researching AI for smart cities. Emily also studied Economics and Environmental Science at Duke University.
