I blogged previously about accessing electric power usage data in Ontario, specifically in Ottawa. As I mentioned in a previous post, Aneesh Chopra, US CTO,  proposed a “Green Button” challenge which aims at allowing customers to download their personal electric power usage data.  In California the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) had asked the state’s three large utilities (Pacific Gas & Electric, San Diego Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison) to start sharing customer data with customers by the end of next year (2012).

Standards

The standards that are relevant to exchanging customer energy usage data are 

• North American Energy Standards Board (NAESB) Energy Services Provider Interface (ESPI)
• Open Automated Data Exchange (OpenADE)

OpenADE is aimed at building interoperable data exchanges that will allow customer authorization and sharing of utility consumption information with 3rd party service providers.

The ESPI will provide a consistent method for Retail Customers to authorize a Third Party to gain access to energy usage data.  This will enable retail customers to choose third party products to assist them to understand their energy usage and to make more economical decisions about the usage.  The intention is to contribute to the development of an open and interoperable method for third party authorization and machine-to-machine exchange of retail customer usage information.

Recently Greentechmedia asked each of the three large utilities in California what their plans are for providing access to cusomer electric power usage data.

San Diego Gas and Electric

SDG&E plans to allow customers to download a CSV file, which can be read by many standard office applications. For the Green Button challenge, SDG&E will let customers download an XML document.

Southern California Edison

SCE also plans to provide a CSV file initially and XML later.  It also is developing a process for handling the security and authorization around customer requests.  SCE said it intends to support ESPI.

PG&E

PG&E is planning to deploy a Green Button solution (XML) on its customer-facing web portals by the end of the year.  It is also setting up a My Energy dashboard to allow download of CSV-formatted data for both electric and gas meters.  PG&E says that it plans to support OpenADE 1.0 with its XML formatted data file.