GBA Sets Open-Source Pathway for Advancing Green Button Development

GBA Sets Open-Source Pathway for Advancing Green Button Development

New Approach Enhances Flexibility, Strengthens Interoperability, Broadens Participation and International Collaboration

Since its inception in 2015, the Green Button Alliance (GBA), by way of its OpenADE Task Force, has been at the forefront of developing for, and contributing to, the North American Energy Standards Board REQ.21 Energy Services Provider Interface (ESPI) Model Business Practices—which, with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) XML standard, and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) OAuth, Atom, & TLS standards—comprise the core of the Green Button Utility Customer-Data Access & Sharing set of standards. To-date, references to the other standards have been documented in ESPI. To continue its industry leadership and innovation, the GBA has established an additional open-source pathway for developing and documenting enhancements to the Green Button standards.

This pathway will build upon—not replace—the ESPI standard, which will remain foundational to Green Button implementations. By incorporating ESPI by reference, GBA will advance additional functionality through open-source development while retaining the established technical foundation.

Expanding Participation and Innovation

The new open-source development approach will broaden opportunities for developers, solution providers, utilities, and other organizations to contribute expertise and shape future specifications. It also accommodates organizations whose policies require ownership of their contributions and participants in regulated markets outside North America.

By enabling a broader range of contributors to participate, GBA will leverage additional expertise in the development of open Green Button specifications, engage markets with evolving approaches to data privacy & security, strengthen interoperability across the energy-data ecosystem, and pave the way for international collaboration and adoption.

Benefits Across the Energy-Data Ecosystem

• Utilities:  A flexible, modular approach supports evolving operational needs and new energy services without requiring every implementation to adopt a new standards version.
• Customers:  Secure, standardized, customer-authorized access to billing and energy-usage data continues to enable innovative energy-management services while supporting utilities’ role as trusted stewards of customer information.
• Developers and solution providers:  Open-source resources create more opportunities to contribute expertise, integrate complementary standards, and shape future functionality.
• International participants:  Open licensing encourages participation beyond North America; supporting broad market collaboration and adoption.

Green Button standards — A Flexible, Modular Specification

Utilizing the open-source development approach enables incremental development of new functionality, including optional components that integrate with other energy-related standards, without requiring all participants to adopt new versions.

Opening Green Button standards will also provide a more-practical way to address errors and corrections. Today, even minor ESPI corrections can require a new version, creating challenges for organizations tied to existing versions by regulatory or technical requirements. Modular development will support updates and enable backward compatibility and interoperability.

What Stays the Same

• ESPI remains foundational to the Green Button standards.
• GBA testing and certification continues for implementations that have ESPI at the core, whether regulations reference “ESPI” specifically or reference “Green Button” more broadly.
• Existing implementations remain valid. New development will be incremental and backward compatible.
• Data-structure-definition files (.xsd) remain openly accessible through the Green Button Data website, helping developers validate their extensible mark-up language (XML) data structures.

Utilities and solution providers with working Green Button implementations do not need to make changes.  Leveraging open source moving forward simply expands opportunities to collaborate on future Green Button specifications and solution enhancements.

Continuing Relationship with NAESB

NAESB has been a valued GBA partner since the Alliance’s founding. GBA intends to continue contributing to ESPI where appropriate and recommending references to new Green Button components developed outside the NAESB process. GBA looks forward to on-going collaboration as NAESB continues to maintain ESPI and as the broader Green Button ecosystem grows.

Looking Ahead

By building upon a decade of standards development and driving innovation forward, utilizing open source, GBA will ensure the Green Button specifications flexibly support the evolving energy market needs; ensure customer data privacy; and enable seamless interoperability — while continuing to advance utility customer-data access across North America and beyond.
   

Open for Industry Participation

Green Button Utility Customer-Data Access & Sharing standards are developed and advanced by industry participation and collaboration. GBA invites developers, utilities, solution providers, policymakers, researchers, academics, and all organizations interested in advancing the Green Button specifications to participate in the Green Button Alliance -hosted OpenADE Task Force meetings, held online monthly.

GBA’s Board of Directors also closely collaborate to advance the standards for the industry. Participating Member companies of the GBA are eligible for election to the Board, and more seats have been opened up at the table to enable greater input and collaboration. Nominations to run for election to the GBA's 2027-2028 Board of Directors open next week. Nominations close in mid-November, so contact the GBA to learn more.

Utilities interested in becoming a Participating Member of the GBA can now benefit from GBA's new pricing model, a free copy of ESPI, two hours of free technical time, and free Green Button testing every two years. If your company is not a Participating Member, learn more at https://www.greenbuttonalliance.org/membership-information.