Sep

Did You Know?

The Green Button Standard Ensures Customer Privacy & Secure Transmission of Energy Data

The Green Button standard is designed to enable utility customers to easily access and securely share their electricity, natural gas, and water-usage information in a consistent format. The standard also ensures the energy-usage information data stream does not contain any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and must be transmitted using a secure-transmission process thus paving the way for utilities to meet requirements for customer privacy set forth in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for the European Union as well as the principles outlined in the U.S. Department of Energy's voluntary DataGuard Energy Data Privacy Program.

The Green Button standard’s Retail Customer schema function requires utilities to transmit PII in a separate, secured transmission apart from the data stream used to transmit a customer’s energy-usage information and it requires the receiving application to logically connect the two, separate data streams.
The Retail Customer data stream transmission also must be authorized by the utility’s customer.
Green Button’s Retail Customer schema enables utilities to protect customers’ PII while allowing them to meet regulators’ and third party non-energy information requirements.

Jun

The Green Button Alliance and the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative jointly announced on the 27th of June that they are the first member-based organizations to join the DataGuard Energy Data Privacy Partnership Program. DataGuard is a voluntary program that provides high-level principles around the treatment, retention, and disposal of customer data and offers a framework for establishing practices that safeguard the access, use, and sharing of customer data; which are described in its Voluntary Code of Conduct (VCC). Other groups with an interest in customer privacy are invited to join the program. The GBA and the SECC will co-host a webinar about the DataGuard Partnership Program.