Enphase achieves greater speed, accuracy, and cost efficiency with Arcadia

Enphase achieves greater speed, accuracy, and cost efficiency with Arcadia

Enphase achieves greater speed, accuracy, and cost efficiency with Arcadia

Use Case

Leverage accurate electric tariff data and bill simulation tools to help customers deliver fast, accurate proposals for solar system sales.

Challenge

Enphase sought to scale solar proposal creation across North America for its core software product, Solargraf, with a focus on accuracy. Constantly changing (and increasingly complex) electric utility tariffs across thousands of utilities — and the changing rules related to compensation mechanisms for rooftop solar customers — made developing in-house bill simulation tools untenable. Enphase needed a technology partner to support accurate bill simulation capabilities on demand.

Solution

Enphase uses Arcadia’s Switch product, which simulates the electricity bill impact and potential savings from installing solar, to accelerate the solar system design process for faster proposal delivery. Today, a salesperson simply has to enter an address in the Solargraf software — which instantly surfaces information about the homeowner’s utility and tariff rate, and runs detailed bill simulations based on solar system and production parameters — to calculate solar savings. 

Benefits

By automating complex solar billing simulations with Arcadia’s Switch product, Enphase can accelerate its ability to efficiently scale accurate proposal generation across North America and refocus precious internal development resources on differentiated features of its solar quoting platform. Specific benefits Enphase unlocked include increased speed, greater accuracy, and reduced soft costs.

• Speed: Solargraf customers can go from address entry to proposal generation in less than two minutes. 
• Accuracy: Solargraf can take comfort in knowing that cost simulations and solar savings calculations in proposals generated on the spot accurately reflect the complex billing dynamics of onsite solar systems, and will align to customer savings once the system is operational.  
• Costs: Enphase can avoid building and staffing a dedicated team to track and model electricity tariffs and incentives. Arcadia makes over 50,000 updates per month to its tariff database, which covers 30,000 electric utility tariffs and riders across over 3,000 utilities. 

In addition to improving Solargraf, Enphase also uses the Arcadia platform to ensure speed and accuracy for Solar Lead Factory, a lead capture engine where homeowners can get connected with participating installers. After the system design, Enphase uses Arcadia’s tools to power the Enphase App, an app that allows homeowners to monitor the savings they’re achieving with solar and storage.

The Story:

Enphase Energy is a pioneering energy technology company working to advance a sustainable future for everyone. In addition to producing hardware for solar and battery systems — more than 4 million Enphase systems have been deployed in over 150 countries — the company is known for innovative software that helps homeowners and commercial businesses get the most out of their solar investments.

Enphase recognized a need to improve tariff data coverage, accuracy, and access for Solargraf — a core software product that serves as an all-in-one solar proposal and design tool. 

With Arcadia’s Switch product, Enphase leverages a comprehensive rate database and sophisticated bill simulation engine to deliver fast, accurate Solargraf proposals that earn trust and drive sales. Enphase can be confident in the accuracy of solar savings results presented to homeowners, and it can redeploy internal resources to develop differentiated features supporting its core software offering for solar installers and homeowners, rather than managing the increasing complexity of solar utility billing rules. 

Today, Solargraf customers enjoy top-tier speed and accuracy in delivering solar system proposals. Due to this increased efficiency, customers also see reduced soft costs as they can more quickly generate accurate solar savings proposals which clearly communicate the value proposition to homeowners. These benefits are a direct result of Enphase’s automated access to Arcadia’s solar billing simulations. As Bhavani Radhakrishnan, Head of Product and Customer Success at Enphase, put it, “It’s incredibly valuable to have all the utility and tariff data points Arcadia captures readily available via the API. That connectivity, to be able to obtain and extract all that data, has helped us improve our offering.”