Green Button: Powering Access to Energy and Water Usage Data

The Green Button energy- and water-data-access standard enables electric, gas, and water utilities to offer customers access to their usage data and empower them to securely share those data with authorized third-party service providers that can help them further monitor and manage their energy or water consumption.

The Green Button standard ensures customer privacy and secure transmission of data; providing customers assurance and helping utilities and solution providers to meet regulatory requirements. Green Button solutions help utilities maximize investments in advanced metering infrastructure but do not require smart meters to be in place for utilities to provide standardized Green Button customer usage data.

Green Button data can be obtained from smart meters, interval meters, manual meters, or net meters and the standard allows the information to be reported in any interval the utility chooses: from 1 minute to 2 months.

• Provides Customer Usage Data with
• or without Smart Meters
• Platform for Digitally Engaging with Customers
• Ensures Utilities & Third Parties
• Protect Customer Privacy
• Cost-effective Deployment Models,
• New Business Opportunities & Programs

Green Button enables building owners and property managers to easily access and collect whole-building energy consumption, generation, and billing data in a common format across single or multiple buildings and utilities—effectively removing time-consuming, manual data collection, processing, and reporting barriers.

Green Button’s standardized format ensures data consistency and accuracy by eliminating manual entry and enables energy managers to link multiple-meter energy usage with location to identify individual buildings—streamlining energy reporting for multiple consumption points. Energy managers can readily access building consumption data and make adjustments faster, can securely share the data with solution providers for further analysis, and can more-easily report the data for portfolio management, compliance, or sustainability programs.

• Standardized Data Access & Easy Collection Across Buildings & Utilities
• Eliminates Manual Data Entry; Ensures Data Consistency & Accuracy
• Data Sharing with Solution Providers & Databases
• Streamlined Energy Reporting; Integration with Benchmarking Platforms
• Tenant-Engagement Applications

The global Green Button standard allows companies to provide smart energy and water conservation platforms and applications to inform customers about their energy and water use and to empower them to manage their use by leveraging the solution providers’ analysis, insights, recommendations, alerts, or reports.

Utility IT companies can leverage the “big data” generated by Green Button products and applications to provide more value for customers. Control vendors can add Green Button functionality directly to products to expand their market. Green Button does not replace existing tools; developers can build a Green Button ‘connector’ to ensure their platform is ready for Green Button certification.

Industries, such as commercial and industrial buildings, heating and cooling, solar, real estate, and the Internet of Things (IoT), are leveraging Green Button data to enable smarter home and building energy management, support solar installation and monitoring, gauge home retrofits for energy efficiency, and to inform on where improvements such as new appliances, LED lighting, or insulation can be made.

Green Button is an open-data standard designed to unlock utility interval and billing data—making them easy to retrieve and seamless to import into software applications. The proliferation of the Green Button data standard among utilities saves solar and energy software applications from having to support customized data formats. It enables them to quickly and securely obtain high-resolution, interval meter data; assures data integrity; and allows a highly accurate and detailed level of analysis.

Utilizing Green Button data, consumers and companies can precisely determine the benefit levels of installing solar by assessing the optimum system size, quantifying the financial savings of a potential system, analyzing existing installations to determine if time-of-use programs could be of value, or monitoring installations for on-going system performance and energy-storage efficacy.

The Green Button Testing and Certification program accelerates the development, deployment, and adoption of compatible, interoperable Green Button solutions. Green Button Certification ensures utilities and application providers that the standard is properly implemented and it assures end-users that the solutions will work together—expanding the market potential for more certified products across the Green Button ecosystem.

The Green Button Alliance (GBA) is comprised of leading utilities, governmental departments and agencies, solution providers, and affiliated organizations that collaborate to advance the Green Button initiative to enable consumers around the world to access and share their energy and water usage data for managing their consumption.

The GBA educates the market on the broad benefits of the Green Button standard, encourages standards-based application development, and administers the Green Button Testing and Certification Program to accelerate the delivery of standardized Green Button technologies to consumers. The standard for Green Button is published by the North American Energy Standards Board (NAESB) as the Energy Service Provider Interface (ESPI).