Virtual Peaker is a Louisville, Kentucky software company selling grid-edge DERMS and virtual power plant software to United States and Canadian electric utilities — investor-owned utilities, municipal utilities, and rural electric cooperatives. Its platform is sold as three suites: Shift (grid-edge DERMS device control and demand response event dispatch), Relay (customer engagement, enrollment, and incentive processing), and Envision (demand forecasting). Virtual Peaker sits in the private DER-orchestration layer of the energy value chain, between device OEMs behind the meter and the utility back office — it is a vendor, not a utility, not a retailer, and not a data holder, so no consumer energy data right attaches to it. There is no Green Button / ESPI implementation here, no Consumer Data Right obligation, and no open market or grid data of any kind. What it does publish is its own API specification: Gravity Connect, an OpenAPI 3.0.0 contract (v2.0.6) that Virtual Peaker authored and openly published as a vendor-agnostic alternative to OpenADR and IEEE 2030.5 for onboarding and controlling DER devices. Gravity Connect is two-sided — the device OEM implements one half, the VPP platform implements the other — and both halves are readable anonymously as full Redoc API references. The honest posture: a real, downloadable, standards-ambitious API contract that is effectively undiscoverable (it is linked from nowhere on the marketing site) and whose credentials are partner-only, issued per utility program by emailing the Gravity Connect team. The commercial Shift API is named and sold on the marketing site but has no public documentation at all.
APIs.json: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/virtual-peaker/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
- Energy
- United States
- Utilities
- Electricity
- Grid
- Demand Response
- DER
- DERMS
- Virtual Power Plant
- EV Charging
- Smart Thermostats
- Energy Storage
- Created: 2026-07-27
- Modified: 2026-07-27
The Device Partner half of Virtual Peaker's Gravity Connect specification — the endpoints a device OEM must implement so a VPP or DERMS platform can discover, enroll, read, group, and command its behind-the-meter DER devices. Version 2.0.6, OpenAPI 3.0.0, 14 paths / 18 operations across Devices, Commands, Device Partner Driven Enrollment, OAuth Device Discovery, Pairing Code Device Discovery (end-user app and utility-commissioned installation), Group Management, and an Energy Interval endpoint. The published servers entry is the placeholder https://example.com because the OEM, not Virtual Peaker, hosts this surface. Secured with OAuth 2.0 — client credentials (scope basic_partner_read_write) for platform-to-partner calls, and authorization code (scope user_read) for homeowner-consented device discovery.
- DER
- Demand Response
- Device Control
- OEM
- OAuth
The VPP half of the Gravity Connect specification — the publishing endpoints Virtual Peaker hosts so an integrated device partner can stream device signals, settings, command status, and enrollment events back into the platform. Version 2.0.6, OpenAPI 3.0.0, 5 paths / 5 operations, all under the Publishing tag and all keyed on a per-program PROGRAM_PUBLISH_KEY. Base URL https://partner.virtualpeaker.io/v1, confirmed live (AWS API Gateway, anonymous request returns HTTP 403 MissingAuthenticationTokenException). Authentication is not OAuth on this side: requests are signed with an HMAC-SHA256 of the request body using a PROGRAM_PUBLISH_SECRET or DEVICE_PUBLISH_SECRET and sent as Authorization: Publish <hmac>.
- Human URL: https://assets.virtualpeaker.io/gravity-connect/vp-api.html
- Base URL:
https://partner.virtualpeaker.io/v1
- DER
- Demand Response
- Publishing
- Webhooks
- HMAC
- Website
- Documentation
- API Reference
- Blog
- Blog RSS
- Support Center
- GitHub Organization
- Privacy Policy
- Terms of Service
- Contact Form
- llms.txt
| Dimension | Finding |
|---|---|
| Home market | United States (secondary Canadian tenant at utility.ca.virtualpeaker.io) |
| Mandate regime | none — a DERMS/VPP software vendor is not a data holder under any energy consumer data right |
| Mandate status | not-applicable — no CDR energy obligation, no Ontario Green Button regulation, no US federal mandate exists, and no voluntary Green Button adoption was found |
| Data standard | Gravity Connect v2.0.6 (Virtual Peaker's own openly-published OpenAPI spec). No Green Button / ESPI, no CDR Consumer Data Standards, no OCPP/OCPI, no IEEE 2030.5, no IEC CIM. OpenADR and IEEE 2030.5 are named only as the incumbents Gravity Connect intends to displace |
| Consumer data API | No — no third-party access to a customer's metered usage or billing data; the nearest surface is a device-level Energy Interval endpoint the OEM implements under program enrollment |
| Open market data | No — publishes no grid, market, load, or emissions data; it ingests such data on behalf of utility customers |
| Access gate | Partner-only — the contract is anonymously readable, but credentials (PROGRAM_PUBLISH_KEY, PROGRAM_PUBLISH_SECRET, DEVICE_PUBLISH_SECRET) are issued per utility program after contacting gravity-connect@virtual-peaker.com. No signup, no sandbox, no pricing |
| Auth model | OAuth 2.0 client credentials + authorization code (platform → OEM); HMAC-SHA256 body signature Authorization: Publish <hmac> (OEM → platform) |
The full probe log, HTTP statuses, harvest provenance, and mandate reasoning are recorded in review.yml.