Fat Spaniel Launches Open Platform for Energy Intelligence

SAN JOSE, CA /PRNewswire/ -- Fat Spaniel Technologies Inc., a market leader in monitoring and reporting services for distributed energy systems, announced the release of Fat Spaniel Insight Platform, the "world's first open intelligence platform for building, sharing, and running energy data applications." Insight Platform provides an open information architecture that enables application developers, system integrators, equipment manufacturers, and others in the renewable-energy industry to extend their existing monitoring resources and develop new service capabilities.

"Insight Platform opens up Fat Spaniel's market-leading technology to help our partners, customers, and the developer community extend in-house monitoring systems, explore entirely new energy management capabilities, and create open integration across multiple vendors, hardware types, and distributed locations," said Chris Beekhuis, President and CTO of Fat Spaniel. "As the industry continues to expand, we hear an increasing need for standardized, powerful-management capabilities that bring the power of information technology to the renewable-energy business. We are proud to be providing a single platform for unleashing innovation and streamlining operations in this high-growth industry."

Capabilities
Fat Spaniel's Insight Platform supports the "largest number of renewable energy devices in the industry"—more than 125 different device types—to deliver critical real-time and historical information about photovoltaic, solar-water-heating, and wind-energy system performance. Through Insight Platform, energy application developers can build full-featured clean-energy and environmental Web applications without having to deal with the headaches of building and maintaining an expensive service infrastructure. Providing a universal platform for high-quality renewable-energy data collection, exchange, and visualization, Insight Platform's open architecture will enable applications such as:

  • Monitored device integration. Capture events and status data from monitored devices in solar electric systems, such as inverters, trackers, and environmental sensors, which can export data to a standard Insight Platform data interface while still leveraging their own built-in sensors, data loggers, and communications equipment.

     

  • Weather data integration. Import data from third-party sources, such as a provider of weather data, into Insight Platform to allow calculating performance ratios comparing how much energy a solar system is actually generating vs. how much energy it should be generating.

     

  • Platform backend support. Use Fat Spaniel's data infrastructure to power proprietary third-party energy applications, with user views that can be branded according to that third party's requirements.

     

  • Customer support. Use inverter-monitored PV system faults to automatically create a customer-support case record in a help-desk application.

     

  • Widgets and mash-ups. Easily embed Fat Spaniel web objects—including widgets, such as charts or tables—in third-party Web sites to create custom views using dynamic Web 2.0 mechanisms.

     

  • Billing. Use data retrieved from Fat Spaniel's data warehouse, using a standard "Get Monitored Information" data interface to generate customer invoices based on energy usage.

Insight Platform Developer Program
Fat Spaniel has worked extensively with a variety of partners to refine the Insight Platform technology and create the foundations of the Insight Platform Developer Program. Current Insight Platform development program participants include such companies as:

Advanced Energy
Campbell Scientific
CH2M HILL
Echelon
Inovateus Development
PV Powered
SatCon Technology
Solectria
 

In a related announcement, Fat Spaniel announced an integrated monitoring solution in partnership with PV Powered. Fat Spaniel expects to announce relationships with a variety of additional partners in the coming months, as their solutions are brought to market.

Platform Architecture
Insight Platform's application programming interface (API) enables interaction with Fat Spaniel's Web services, which operate in a hosted, multi-tenant environment that allows shared use of a highly scalable, robust, and secure backend infrastructure. This infrastructure is hosted in a SAS-70 Type II certified data center, which processes millions of energy-intelligence transactions daily. The developer-friendly platform is compatible with any programming language that can access a Web Service and is implemented using industry standards, such as SOAP, XML, WSDL, and HTTP.

Availability Insight Platform is available to partners and developers. To find out how to obtain a copy of the "Insight Platform Web Services API Developer Guide" and for further information about Insight Platform, contact [email protected].

About Fat Spaniel
Based in San Jose, CA, Fat Spaniel Technologies Inc. is a leading provider of monitoring and reporting services for distributed renewable-energy systems, enabling efficient operations and maintenance, compelling Web-based visualization, and accurate reporting. Fat Spaniel's services are based on Insight Platform, the "industry's first open platform for multi-vendor system and portfolio monitoring." Users of Fat Spaniel's services include system owners, system integrators, PPA service providers, utilities, inverter manufacturers, project-financing firms, REC traders, and regulatory agencies. The company specializes in renewable-energy systems, including solar electric, solar water heatingm, and small wind. Fat Spaniel products are presently deployed in over 1500 locations in 13 countries worldwide. Fat Spaniel is funded by Chrysalix Energy, Element Partners, Ignition Partners, PCG Clean Energy & Technology Fund, and Applied Ventures LLC, the venture capital arm of Applied Materials Inc.