Green Button Platform

The Regulation can be reviewed here. 

Ontario is providing families and businesses more control over their electricity bills with the introduction of a new Green Button Standard that will allow access to their data with the goal of better tracking energy use, reducing bills and saving money.

On November 1st, 2021, Todd Smith, Minister of Energy for Ontario, announced a mandate requiring nearly all regulated Ontario electricity and natural gas utilities to provide Green Button to their customers within twenty-four months. Read the full news release here.

• Improve energy efficiency – Consumers can use Green Button data to identify and compare their energy usage in order to improve energy efficiency within their home or business.
• Reduce energy costs – By learning their usage patterns and habits, consumers can make informed choices about how much energy they use and when they use it. When consumers use energy during off-peak hours (also known as peak-shaving) and invest in energy-efficient appliances, it saves money and can help reduce strain on the grid.
• Energy conservation – consumers can use their data to conserve energy, to help reduce their carbon footprint and protect the environment.
• Secure access – with Green Button standards, consumers can rest assured that their data and private information is secure. Utilities must go through a strict testing and certification process to become Green Button standard-compliant.

Green Button allows customers to download their electricity usage data and account holder information from their utility and authorize the secure, automatic transfer of this data to a third-party’s Green Button application of their choice.

Here’s how it works:

• Meters capture customers’ energy data which is collected by their utility.
• The utility converts the data into the Green Button format. From here customers can:
  
  • DOWNLOAD my data
    • Customers can download their energy data from their utility and use it for their own purposes, OR
  • CONNECT my data
    • Customers can choose a third-party application that uses the Green Button format
    • Customers can give their utility permission to securely transfer their energy data to the application
    • The application provides customers with information and analysis based on their energy data

Download My Data (DMD) enables utility consumers to access their utility data in an industry-standard XML format manually. Customers can then analyze historical and recent usage data to identify trends and make informed choices about their usage.

Connect My Data (CMD) is the industry standard for securely authorizing and sharing utility data with third-party solution providers. With CMD, utility consumers can digitally authorize their usage data to be shared with energy-efficiency applications, clean energy companies, analytics firms, and others, who can view and analyze the data and provide additional insights into managing and conserving resource consumption.

Customers use Download My Data to download their own account information manually.  Customers use Connect My Data to authorize the automated delivery of the same data. 

A third party is a company, organization and/or individual that wants and is authorized to receive data from a utility account holder. This could be a larger user, multi-building owner, consultant or third-party vendor, which would include utilities themselves wanting to use other utility information.