Public APIs are everywhere. Google has its search, maps and GoogleBase APIs, Yahoo has its own series of APIs from Yahoo! Maps to Financial Data, to photos, let’s not forget Flickr, BlinkSale and Basecamp. These API’s allow for easy integration of services that would otherwise be two very disparate services – like geotagging your photos from flickr via googlemaps, or pulling your invoices from BlinkSale into Quickbooks. With the roll-out of smart meters across the province already in process and the eventual move to time-of-use pricing by the time all Ontario homes have smart meters; whereby the cost of electricity will increase in periods of high demand, and decrease in periods of low demand, I can see some pretty interesting uses for an electricity pricing API – which ultimately benefits customers that will save on their electricity bills, and for the LDCs that won’t have to purchase extra capacity under peak loads.

By exposing a simple XML web service on their site a customer would be able to gain access to realtime pricing via their LDC. I imagine this is in the works for realtime online billing, but not having to login to the LDC’s site to determine current rates and exposing the rates via a simple XML or HTTP POST would allow for integration into other systems and appliances. If rates vary a great deal from customer to customer, then all that’s needed is a private key implementation to ensure that only that customer has access to their live pricing. Pipe this over SSL, and you’re set.

At the very least, this would allow customers to view live electricity pricing from their desktop via a Yahoo Desktop Widget or an Apple Dashboard Widget, or have SMS alerts delivered to their Blackberry and act accordingly. In other cases WiFi-enabled thermostats could be programmed to poll for the latest pricing and only come on below a certain price threshold, or comapies that do a lot of printing could have their large print runs automatically run at off-peak hours to save money and reduce costs.

I’m sure there’s a number of other usage cases I could come up with, but the real advantage (as realized by Google, YouTube, and every other web service API provider) is that the LDC only has to provide the electricity usage API and perhaps a few code samples. As the prices for electricity continue, the developer community at large will be the ones to put that data to use in innovative and mutually beneficial ways.