In late 2016, Clean Power Research announced a new integration between PowerClerk® and Stripe for ePayment processing. Stripe allows applicants to pay fees such as application fees via an online system integrated with PowerClerk’s workflow, rather than physically mailing checks or other forms of out-of-band payment. Clean Power Research selected Stripe as the turnkey ePayment platform for PowerClerk to give customers the ability to rapidly and easily set up an ePayment system.
Duke’s success with ePayments
Duke Energy added ePayments to their existing PowerClerk interconnection application portal in December 2016. According to Duke Energy’s Lee McKoy, Beckton James and Krishna Aguduru in a recent User Group meeting, the time required to adopt Stripe was “almost instant” from the time they received internal approval to use Stripe. Customer adoption was rapid: By the end of February, Beckton James said that approximately 85% of application fees were being paid electronically rather than by paper check.
At Duke, a submitted interconnection application is not reviewed until the application fee has been paid, a similar requirement to other interconnection programs in the U.S. Prior to using ePayments, each application submitted to Duke would sit in a Request Pending status until the payment was mailed, received and processed.
Now that the majority of Duke’s applicants are using ePayments, the average time each project spends in the Request Pending status has been reduced by 9.4 days or 90%. Additionally, Duke has been able to reallocate an entire full-time employee that had previously been dedicated solely to processing checks.
Duke’s customers also benefit from the switch to ePayments, as their applications are reviewed much more quickly, allowing them to finish projects faster.
Interested in learning more about ePayments in PowerClerk?
ePayments are just one of the many ways in which PowerClerk is helping customers streamline distributed energy resource application processing. Read about other customers using ePayments in the articles below, or contact us to discuss how we can help you.
How Orange and Rockland Utilities reduced interconnection application errors by 95%
How Tucson Electric Power is advancing DER workflow management