I suspect they wouldn’t do this because it will cost them quite a lot of money to provide the service if it catches on. The service that is supplying that data is hosted in Amazon Web Services so is costing Emporia $ both to provide it and for the bandwidth (data transfer).
I think the best way for them to provide such a feature would be to allow local access and run a little “web server” in the VUE itself.
What’s happening now is the data is sent via wifi to the internet into a bunch of leased servers in what appears to be an Amazon West Coast US data center.
When you fire up the https://web.emporiaenergy.com/ website, it contacts a remote computer, formats the data and sends it to your browser.
Because of the costs, their tradeoff is to let you watch the data for 20 minutes before it says “Are you still there” to cut their costs.
There is another downside to the way it works now (as well as an upside). The other downside is that all those cool tools – like excess solar energy handling rely on both the wifi (local internet on VUE 3) and the data center being up and accessible. The upside is it’s relatively easy to make the AWS servers do more features and functions – easier than updating an pushing out changes to every VUE box out there, but that adds delay and cost, too!
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