Green Button Connect My Data (CMD) is the energy-industry standard—formally, the “NAESB REQ.21 - Energy Services Provider Interface Model Business Practices” standard (purchase the standard) for enabling easy access to, and secure sharing of, utility-customer energy- and water-usage data. Utilities providing standards-based Green Button customer-consumption and billing data can provide customers new data-driven services, programs, and platforms; digitally empowering customers with the ability to securely transfer their data to third-party solution providers who can further assist them in monitoring and managing energy or water usage.
Utilities having existing Green Button CMD implementations—or in the process of developing Green Button CMD offerings—can apply for Green Button CMD testing at https://www.greenbuttonalliance.org/testing.
Green Button Connect My Data (CMD) is an open-data standard designed to unlock access to utility interval usage and billing data—providing easy, seamless access for software applications.
Green Button CMD enables utility customers to authorize third-party solutions to quickly and securely obtain interval meter data and enables an accurate and detailed level of analysis to inform energy and water management decision-making—while ensuring customer data are protected and their privacy is maintained.
The Green Button standard ensures data integrity and accuracy; eliminates the need for manual data entry; and for building-energy managers, it significantly simplifies the data-collection and -reporting process across multiple utilities and jurisdictions.
Utilities can generate Green Button data from measurements obtained from smart meters, conventional meters, or bi-directional/net meters. The standard enables utilities to report customer electricity-, natural gas-, or water-usage data in any interval they choose including 1-minute, 15-minute, hourly, daily, or monthly; as long as the data interval can be provided by the utility’s meters.
Green Button Retail Customer schema enables utilities to protect customers’ Personally Identifiable Information (PII) by requiring utilities to transmit PII in a secured transmission that is separate from the secured data stream used to transmit a customer’s energy-usage information (EUI). The receiving application is required to logically connect the separate data streams.
Green Button Usage Summary capability enables utilities to provide non-energy billing-statement information and contains all utility billing categories
The Green Button Alliance offers a Green Button Testing Program for Data Custodians.
The GBA tests both automated-sharing, Green Button Connect My Data implementations and file-oriented Green Button Download My Data (DMD) implementations to verify for utilities (data custodians) that they have properly implemented the Green Button standard and that the implementations will provide consistent Green Button data that will securely work with Green Button standard-compliant applications.
Once the implementation has passed GBA testing, the GBA will issue a “Green Button Certified DMD” and/or “CMD” mark which will assure third-party developers and customers that the implementation has been GBA-tested and complies with Green Button standards—and that customer privacy will be protected.
The Alliance is a nonprofit organisation comprised of utilities, app developers, government entities, and more. Come learn about us.