By: Barbara Vergetis Lundin |
The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and Citizens Utility Board (CUB) of Illinois have filed an “Open Data Access Framework” with state regulators that would, for the first time, give customers the right to automatically receive detailed information about their own energy usage, empowering customers control their energy usage, conserve energy, and reduce carbon pollution.
The framework is intended to provide guidance to public utility commissions throughout the country on how to set a standard for customer access to their own energy data, and create a consistent national regulatory model (much like Green Button Connect has done as a technical standard) to enable third-party energy software and hardware providers to scale to all markets.
“This new framework will make Illinois the first state that requires utilities, at a minimum, to adopt a national data access standard — like Green Button Connect — that will ensure consumers have easy and timely access to their own energy data,” said Andrew Barbeau, EDF consultant and president of the Accelerate Group.