Integrated Energy Project Model The growth of the renewable energy and energy efficiency industries have led to a wide range of websites and software tools for both consumers (homeowners and businesses) and service providers (contractors). Consumers can leverage tools that recommend energy efficiency measures (EEMs) and renewable energy projects, identify qualified contractors, coordinate contracting and purchasing, as well as manage implementation and post-project analysis and review. Service providers list services with these sites, and are adopting tools to automate their business processes to market, bid, contract, and manage projects. However, there are currently no established standards by which all of these websites and tools, for both consumers and service providers, can readily share information about customers, projects, products and services.

The IEP team was initially funded in 2010 by the CPUC’s California Solar Initiative (CSI) to develop an Integrated Energy Project (IEP) Model to standardize and integrate the data underlying these processes. The IEP Model introduces a common language to project stakeholder software applications – it provides a comprehensive, standardized definition of an EE/DR+PV project, as well as how stakeholders can communicate between each other about that project. This will simplify and streamline the process, reduce time and costs for both the consumer and contractors, produce a better ROI for both, and remove a key market barrier for the adoption of both EEM’s and solar energy.

In 2014, SolarNexus, a key member of the IEP Model development team, was awarded a cooperative agreement from the U.S. Department of Energy SunShot Initiative Incubator Program to build and demonstrate the solar industry's first integrated ecosystems of applications using IEP XML. As part of this initiative, SolarNexus and several other solar software vendors are working together to enhance the model to satisfy a variety of production use cases, thereby demonstrating the model's effectiveness.