Newsletter | September 2018

September 5, 2018

in Newsletters,

Welcome New Members |

Union Gas Limited is a major Canadian natural gas storage, transmission and distribution company based in Ontario with over 100 years of experience and service to customers. The distribution business serves about 1.5 million residential, commercial and industrial customers in more than 400 communities across Ontario. Union Gas, an Enbridge Company-one of Canada's Top 100 Employers for 2018-has assets of $8.9 billion and approximately 2,300 employees.

GBA News & Updates |

GBA Launches Green Button Connect My Data Certification Program

The Green Button Alliance announced the launch of its Green Button Connect My Data (CMD) Certification Program for electricity, natural gas, and water utilities (data custodians).

The availability of the Green Button CMD Certification Program comes at a key time for the industry as utilities look to provide proven, standards-based solutions for secure customer data-access and sharing. Green Button CMD certification will assure utilities their implementations are Green Button standards-compliant and will ensure customer privacy and the seamless and secure transmission of data to third-party solutions.

A GBA-founding member, UL Verification Services (UL), is a GBA-authorized test laboratory and conducts the ANSI-audited Green Button Certified CMD testing process. London Hydro's cloud-based energy service platform is the first utility implementation to be certified Green Button CMD standards-compliant by UL. The "Green Button Certified CMD" mark on London Hydro's site now assures the utility, its customers, and third-party solution providers, that London Hydro's implementation is standards-compliant and new data-driven services and applications will seamlessly and securely work-together, while ensuring customer privacy. Learn more about the Green Button Connect My Data standard and the Certification program and the benefits to utilities.

Webinar:

DataGuard Energy Data Privacy Partnership Program

The Green Button Alliance and members Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative, U.S. Department of Energy and UtilityAPI recently presented a webinar about the U.S. DOE's DataGuard Energy Data Privacy Partnership Program . To learn about the v oluntary program that offers a framework for establishing practices that safeguard the access, use and sharing of utility customer data and how it benefits data-sharing companies and their customers, watch the webinar .

The Green Button Alliance announced the launch of its Green Button Connect My Data (CMD) Certification Program for electricity, natural gas, and water utilities (data custodians).

Do You Know? |

The Green Button Standard Ensures Customer Privacy & Secure Transmission of Energy Data

The Green Button standard is designed to enable utility customers to easily access and securely share their electricity, natural gas, and water-usage information in a consistent format. The standard also ensures the energy-usage information data stream does not contain any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and must be transmitted using a secure-transmission process thus paving the way for utilities to meet requirements for customer privacy set forth in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for the European Union as well as the principles outlined in the U.S. Department of Energy's voluntary DataGuard Energy Data Privacy Program.

The Green Button standard’s Retail Customer schema function requires utilities to transmit PII in a separate, secured transmission apart from the data stream used to transmit a customer’s energy-usage information and it requires the receiving application to logically connect the two, separate data streams.
The Retail Customer data stream transmission also must be authorized by the utility’s customer.
Green Button’s Retail Customer schema enables utilities to protect customers’ PII while allowing them to meet regulators’ and third party non-energy information requirements.

GBA Now Offers a Green Energy Job Board:

The Green Button Alliance now makes a job board and career center available for those interested in new employment opportunities in the green energy sector, and for companies looking for qualified candidates.

In the Headlines |

05 September: ZOME Energy Networks announced its free cloud-based energy program “ZOMEHOME” to further a household’s ability to reduce energy consumption with industry-standard smart home equipment.

30 August: " Nest and OhmConnect Partner to Bring Grid-Responsive Smart Thermostats to Scale " by Jeff St. John, Greentech Media

29 August: The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO) released its " PowerForward " report - a roadmap to Ohio's electricity future.

28 August: The U.S. Department of Energy's Better Buildings Home Energy Information Accelerator released a new toolkit: " Bringing Home Energy Information to Real Estate ".

12 August: " Innovator's Spotlight: Wexus Technologies, Empowering Farmers with Data-Driven Insights " by Leanna Sweha, for The Vine blog.

07 August: " Artificial Intelligence-based Data Monitoring Helps ETS Clients Control Energy Costs ", by Steve Lubetkin, GlobeSt.com. Article includes podcast interview with Jeff Hendler, CEO, Logical Buildings (formerly ETS).

07 August: Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative is now taking nominations for its " 2018 Best Practices Awards " to be presented at its 2019 Consumer Symposium on 04 February 2019.

27 July: " Interview with David Havyatt, Architect of Australia's Consumer Data Right " by Michael Murray, Mission:data Coalition.

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