We build the retail energy software we kept wishing existed.
ESI Energy builds Conduit for retailers operating in ERCOT (Texas) — the enrollment, market, billing and settlement work that every REP does and almost nobody enjoys.
Why
The stack was the problem.
A retail electricity provider is, mechanically, a translation layer. Documents arrive from ERCOT and the wires companies. Usage arrives from meters. Money leaves for delivery charges and arrives from customers. Somebody has to make all of it agree.
Almost every retailer does this with an EDI vendor, a billing vendor, a CRM, and a set of spreadsheets holding the seams together. Each piece works. The failures live between them — an enrollment that never became an account, a meter read that arrived after the bill, a TDSP invoice nobody had the hours to check, a past-due account nobody worked because it was on the other system.
Conduit is the argument that those seams are the product. One customer record, one service point, one ledger, one event backbone — so the enrollment, the read, the invoice and the payment are already the same account by the time anyone looks.
How we build
Five things we will not trade away.
Money is not a feature area
Billing sits on a real double-entry ledger because a balance you cannot derive from entries is a balance you cannot defend. Every invoice, payment, adjustment and refund posts. The trial balance is not a report we assemble — it is the same ledger the bills wrote to.
One record, or it will disagree
The most expensive hour in retail energy is the one spent working out which of two systems is right about a customer. We would rather build the harder integrated thing once than sell you a reconciliation step forever.
Boring where it counts
Transactional outboxes, idempotent consumers, row-level security, append-only history. None of this demos well. All of it is why the demo still matches reality after eighteen months.
Built for the person who lives in it
Most of our screens are used all day by someone who is measured on throughput. That makes density, keyboard reach and honest empty states a functional requirement, not a design preference.
Say what it does
In the product and here. If something is not built yet, we will tell you it is not built yet. A roadmap slide has never once made an enrollment go through.
Where
Texas first, and properly.
Conduit is built for ERCOT. That means Texas SET 5.0 as the transaction catalog, ERCOT's own MarkeTrak taxonomy for issue resolution, TDU delivery tariffs by utility and rate class, and the Texas bill stack — sales tax with the residential exemption, Miscellaneous Gross Receipts Tax, and the PUC assessment.
We would rather be genuinely correct in one market than approximately correct in five. Other deregulated markets are additions we will scope with the retailer who needs one first.
Come and argue with us about it.
If you run a book and think we have got something wrong, that is a conversation we want. Bring the case that breaks it.