How sonnen Scaled Their VPP with Leap API Automations

Solution: Leap's APIs

sonnen’s operations team integrated Leap’s APIs and replaced recurring manual processes across four key use cases.

Before: Manually compile meter data, event performance, and revenue from the Leap platform into customer-specific statements, taking on average 45 hours per quarter.

After: Scripts pull and process Leap data automatically. Operations staff runs a script and validates results, taking on average 3 hours per quarter.

Quarterly Customer Statement Generation

After: Scripts pull and process Leap data automatically. Operations staff run a script and validate output in just 3 hours.

Before: Annually determining and submitting customer bonus payments manually included data retrieval, calculations, and validations that took on average 70 hours to complete.

Annual Performance Bonus Payments

Before: 4 hours in preparation for the summer season plus 1.5 hours/month ongoing over the 6-month summer season to determine additional customers to enroll, prepare new meter CSVs, upload files, and adjust participation statuses per meter.

After: Enter eligibility dates and run a script—a few minutes per month.

Ongoing Portfolio Management

Before: 13 hours/month to retrieve interval data per participating device, compile CSVs, upload files, and troubleshoot data validation errors over the 6-month summer season.

After: Script handles both data extraction and submission, and ensures data accuracy. Minutes of work per month to run the script.

Interval Data Submissions

Challenges

Ensuring a great customer experience with accurate and timely reporting and payments while also managing ongoing VPP participation required a significant amount of effort from sonnen’s operations team.

Before automation:

• Quarterly statements required 45 hours per cycle and annual bonuses required 70 hours per cycle of manual workbook updates and data validations.

• Keeping their customer portfolio up to date required repetitive and manual tasks including managing and formatting CSVs.

• Interval data submissions involved hours of retrieving data, formatting, and troubleshooting validation errors.

These processes were time-consuming, error-prone, and limited the team’s ability to grow their VPP enrollments and revenue without adding staff.

Use Cases

Operational ROI

*Using industry average $71/hr operations cost and $74/hr development cost

By investing developer time in automating these workflows, sonnen significantly improved their operations and recouped their investments in just a few months.

Impact on Growth

Automating these VPP operational workflows has driven rapid portfolio and earnings growth over the last two years. sonnen has:

• Tripled their meter count in CAISO

• Increased program revenue more than 10x.

• Maintained a great customer experience without proportional staff increases.

Objectives

sonnen set out to:

1. Automate the most labor-intensive VPP operations workflows.
2. Free up operations staff for high-value strategic initiatives.
3. Ensure scalability to handle significant customer and meter growth.
4. Reduce errors and compliance risk with consistent, API-driven data flows.

Key Lessons

• Prioritize high-effort workflows first—look for tasks done repeatedly on a monthly or quarterly cycle.

• Collaborate closely between operations and technical resources to capture the business logic behind processes.

• Bundle related workflows into single scripts to maximize code reuse and minimize maintenance.

• Automate early—the sooner a process is automated, the more hours it saves as the VPP grows.

Growth in program revenue

10x

Increase in customer meters

3x

Decrease in manual work of key operations

95%

The development payback period based on the operational savings alone was less than 6 months.

sonnen, a global leader in residential energy storage and virtual power plant (VPP) innovation, leveraged Leap’s universal API suite to quickly expand its California grid services footprint.

Overview

Heading into 2023, sonnen had already automated two of the most labor-intensive processes in their VPP operations — customer enrollment (by embedding Leap Connect into their sign-up workflows) and dispatch event scheduling. These early wins eliminated hours of manual work and set the stage to scale.

In 2024 and early 2025, the team went further, automating additional operational workflows in order to free staff from repetitive tasks and allow them to redirect focus toward strategic initiatives like portfolio expansion and revenue growth. The results over these two years were impressive:

Results

• Total annual labor savings: Over 324 hours initially and much higher today based on the increased customer and meter counts in the program.

• Immediate operational ROI—payback in less than 6 months on average.

• Staff time redirected to strategic growth activities.