Chairman's View | 2016-06
Date postedJune 1, 2016
The energy industry is transforming and is actively investigating and selecting innovative technology platforms based on business and customer benefits, ease of integration and interoperability with their existing and planned smart grid investments, overall implementation costs, and time to market. Utilities; their customers; and industries like solar, real estate, and the Internet of Things (IoT); are also highly interested in analyzing and leveraging customer energy-usage information in a variety of ways. The Green Button Alliance believes Green Button will play a key role in the transformation of the energy industry.
The Green Button Alliance receives many enquiries from around the world regarding the capabilities of the standard, which are addressed by our technical staff. In this issue, our "Tech Corner" feature highlights the powerful, lesser-known, and newer capabilities of the flexible Green Button standard and clarifies some common misconceptions. Read below to gain a new understanding about Green Button data and smart meters, how Green Button implementations stack-up against existing technologies, and the powerful capabilities enabled by the Green Button Retail Customer Schema, UsageSummary, Summary Billing, and UsagePoint metering functionality. These features provide significant functionality to utilities, residential customers, commercial energy managers, and vendors.
In addition, some may not be aware that the Green Button standard is designed to support all utility customer-usage data ─energy, natural gas, and water. The Green Button standard enables energy providers to offer access to energy-use data whether or not smart meters are in place; and similarly, smart water meters are not required for water utilities to provide Green Button water-usage data. Water utilities can deploy Green Button water-use platforms to enable their customers to access their usage data to better-understand how they can conserve this precious resource. And for vendors, just imagine the worldwide market opportunity for standardized Green Button water-conservation applications that work across all water utilities.
If your company is planning to provide customers with energy- or water-usage data─or has already developed solutions that address requirements for customer data access─the Green Button Alliance can help you further. We look forward to working with you.
─ Syed Mir, Chairman