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Frequently Asked Questions

These Technical Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) are a work-in-progress culmination of questions we often get from Utility representatives, Third Party developers, Customers of both, and commissions and consumer advocates.

For more-technical information, look to our Technical FAQs and our Developer Resources.
   

The Green Button initiative is an industry-led effort to respond to a White House call-to-action to provide electricity customers with easy access to their energy usage data in a consumer-friendly and computer-friendly format.  The Green Button now also supports Natural Gas- and Water-use data in-addition to Electricity; plus many other things.

Green Button platforms are where energy information is found—whether hosted at a Utility, an Aggregator, or perhaps even from the software that interfaces to a solar array.

Check with your electricity, natural gas, or water Utility to see if they have implemented the Green Button data-download or data-connect sharing methods.

If your utility does not-yet provide the Green Button, let us know—and let them know that you want it.  The Green Button Alliance is here to help make Green Button solutions available to everyone.

The Green Button effort was created with the support of:

  • the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE),
  • the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST),
  • the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP),
  • the Utility Communications Architecture International Users Group (UCAIug), and
  • the White House.

The North American Energy Standards Board’s Energy Services Provider Interface (NAESB REQ.21 ESPI standard) serves as the basis for Green Button technology by providing a model for business practices, use cases, and and how the standards work together (see the next FAQ for a list of those standards).

The answer is twofold:  Awareness & Mitigation

Awareness:

To enable end-users (consumers of electricity, natural gas, and water) to change behav­iors assoc­iated with usage, those end-users must be aware of their use and their patterns of use.  To do that, they need access to their usage data.  Once they have access, they can take action to reduce their overall usage; deter­mine if solar might be right for them; allow companies and apps to assist in under­standing where improve­ments (e.g., insulation, UV glazing, new appliances, LED lighting, low-flow showerheads) may be able to help them; and even be able to save money where time-of-use (TOU) pricing for elec­tricity provides incen­tives for off-peak shifting of energy consump­tion.

Mitigation:

Aside from the end-users’ benefits, there may be societal and environ­mental benefits to these reduc­tions and peak-shaving actions, where climate-change mitiga­tion starts from measuring one’s impact in order to begin making those changes—whether manually or by automa­tion. Enough collec­tive shifting of use from peak hours of the day may enable a utility to avoid the use of diesel generators to make up the difference.  That may reduce costs for the utility and reduce charges to the end users—all while benefiting the environ­ment.

Take a look at our Green Button Connect My Data page to learn more about the benefits of Green Button CMD to utilities and utility customers.

Green Button CMD

Green Button was designed, from the start, to be very flexible (it can report electricity, natural gas, water, propane, steam, sewerage, methane, … and much more — see those on this page).

The idea was to ensure it was not too prescriptive: let utilities provide the data that they can; rather than make it so hard to implement that no utility would.  Further, different jurisdictions have different needs for their constituencies.  Green Button allows public-utility commissions to choose the ideal selection of features for their needs.

Early implementations (before 2015) were built to the standards but there was no entity testing those implementations, so some were better than others.  The Green Button Alliance was formed in 2015 to help utilities create Green Button platforms for their customers and to help them meet the standards in doing so.  Our DMD Certification program launched later that year and our CMD Certification program launched at the end of 2019.  Due to the covid-19 pandemic, many utilities were slow to go through the Certification process but by the end of 2023 there were over 100 Certified implementations.

To find Utilities offering Green Button to their Customers, look to our Green Button Directory Services℠, released in September 2024. 
Not at all.  If a house has an electricity meter for normal operation but a separate meter for the air-conditioning coils (an early demand-response solution), then the utility can provide the interval data from each of the meters separately.
Further, now that many people generate their own solar electricity and sell back to the utility, they may have a separate (outflow) or combination (forward/reverse) meter for their solar panels, instead of just a “net” meter reporting inflow minus outflow.  In that case, the data reported via Green Button can also be separate.
Looking at commercial and industrial use cases:
Utilities don’t typically gather circuit-level usage data from the building side of the meters (beyond the meter, from their perspective).  Thus, to receive the circuit-level interval data, sensors need to be connected to the circuits or smart circuit breakers be used.  Those are usually feeding data back to a software system and that software system could produce Green Button data for the building owners/operators.
Green Button data can be provided by anyone with the raw data; it is not exclusive to Utilities.
A community wind farm could provide Green Button data.  A home’s solar-panel system could provide Green Button data.  Aggregation companies could gather both Green Button and on-site measured data and compile them into yet-another, secondary Green Button file or stream.  Some municipal Utilities are considering getting electricity, natural gas, and water data from their different providers and then outputting the combined data in the Green Button format for their communities.  There’s no restriction on the creativity. 
The smallest, or most-granular, interval is theoretically 1 second.
In other words, if the Utility could measure data at the meter, transmit it to their servers, and store data at one-second intervals, then they could provide it in the Green Button format.  Most jurisdictions require one-hour intervals at a maximum for electricity for residential customers.  Some may require 15- or 5-minute intervals for commercial or industrial customers.
Regardless of the interval duration, most Utilities provide data “next day” — yesterday’s data, today; today’s data tomorrow.  In some locations, there are some exceptions to this norm; where data are provided with a delay of only a handful of hours or fewer.  Sometimes this is regulated by the jurisdiction: requiring that all data goes through complete, revenue-grade verification steps.  Other jurisdictions allow for Utilities to send-out the data sooner.
In any case, the data can be “tagged” with a Quality of Reading indicator.  See the next FAQ for more on this.
The accuracy of measurements is outside the scope of Green Button.  The reason for this is because there are many standards that deal with accuracy and jurisdictions determine which will be used.  If the accuracy of the data is sufficient for billing purposes, then it will be used.
Inaccuracies in data will result in inaccuracies in billing and/or Green Button files/streams.  It is the concept of “garbage in; garbage out”:
  • Green Button is not a platform, it is an enabling technology. 
  • Green Button is not a set of algorithms and code, it is a format and transit specification.
  • Green Button is not a set of rules for what must be shared, it is an enabler of interoperability options — to be chosen by jurisdictions around the world for their particular use; whether in Canada, Korea, the Unites States, or anywhere else it has been implemented.
Quality instead of Accuracy:
As noted in the previous FAQ: data can be “tagged” with a Quality of Reading indicator.
For example: an interval of data might be tagged to denote that it was a raw reading (subject to change later) and, when fully vetted to be revenue-grade, would be re-issued in the Green Button format with the same interval identifier but with a different Quality of Reading tag denoting that it is a valid value for billing purposes.
Likewise, when a reading cannot be made, an estimated value might be provided — and it might be updated in the future or it might be marked as being how they will be billed for it.
There are currently over a dozen Quality of Reading options in the NAESB REQ.21 ESPI, Green Button core standard and more can be added if needed.  Green Button is open set of standards and anyone — GBA Member or not — can participate in our technical committee to suggest additions and improvements.

Applications, or “apps,” are available from multiple vendors to help homeowners, renters, business owners, and others reach their goals—whether the goal is to install solar, “go net-zero,” shave peak costs in regions with time-of-use (TOU) pricing, reduce environmental footprints, or to simply understand how one property in a portfolio compares to another.

Look to the Green Button Alliance membership for solutions or look to our Green Button Directory Services℠, released in September 2024, for a growing list of Third Party providers of apps and solutions.
Most utilities provide data in the Green Button format for Electricity usage or Natural Gas usage but Water usage is also possible — potable/drinkable water, gray/reclaimed water, and waste/sewage water; all as separate commodity types in the Green Button format.
In fact, here are the commodity/resource types that Green Button can represent today:

Additional Utility Resources:

  • Electricity (primary metered)
  • Electricity (secondary metered)
  • Electricity (transmission “metered”)
  • Natural Gas
  • Steam
  • Drinkable Water(potable)
  • Reclaimed water (gray, irrigation, non-potable)
  • Waste Water (sewerage)
  • Propane (C3H8)
  • Heating Fluid
  • Cooling Fluid

and it isn’t all liquids and gasses:

  • Trash (refuse)
  • Television (license)
  • Communication (infrastructure)
  • Internet Service

There are also non-commodity measurements: 

  • Insulative Gas
  • Insulative Oil

and here are eight very-important eco measurements:

  • Carbon
  • Carbon Dioxide (CO2)
  • Hexachlorocyclohexane (HCH)
  • Methane (CH4)
  • Nitrous Oxides (NOX)
  • Perfluorocarbons (PFC)
  • Sulfur Dioxide (SO2)
  • Sulfurhexafluoride (SF6)

There’s also consideration in our technical committee to include additional commodity/resources, like Hydrogen, Petrol/Gasoline, and Diesel; as well as other greenhouse-gas information, including provenance of energy sources.

Green Button is an ever-growing and -enhancing set of standards and anyone — GBA Member or not — can participate in our technical committee to drive the standards to the next level.

More FAQs are coming soon (likely tomorrow).

Button Colors

Aren’t there other button colors out there? How do they relate to Green Button?

We get his question often, so here’s the quick answer:

The Blue Button was first to “let you go online and download your health records so you can use them to improve your health, have more control over your personal health information and your family’s healthcare.”
(HealthIT.gov, retrieved 2016-03-03)