If you are looking for Kitchener-Wilmot Hydro or Waterloo North Hydro, you are looking for Enova Power. Enova Power Corp. is the regulated electricity distributor created by the merger of Kitchener-Wilmot Hydro and Waterloo North Hydro, and it serves more than 164,000 residential and business customers across Kitchener, Waterloo, Woolwich, Wilmot and Wellesley. Accounts that used to sit under either of the old names are now Enova accounts, and the usage data comes from one place.
This guide covers what Enova publishes through Green Button, what you need in hand before you start, what the data actually contains, and what changes once you are dealing with more than a handful of accounts. The pattern is the same at most Ontario distributors, so the broader guide on how to get utility data from Ontario utilities covers the general case, and the supported utilities page lists the distributors EZGB already collects from.
What Enova offers
Enova publishes a Green Button page that describes the programme for residential and business customers, and it supports both of the standard access modes. In Enova's own words, Green Button gives customers access to their electricity usage data so they can track how they are using electricity and identify ways to save.
The two modes answer different questions, and the one you choose determines how much ongoing work you sign up for:
- Download My Data gives you a file. Enova states that the download is in an industry-standard XML format designed to be read by computer applications rather than by people.
- Connect My Data gives an authorized third party an ongoing feed. Enova describes this as sharing your data with a third-party company you authorize, or uploading it to an app.
If the difference is not obvious yet, Connect My Data and Download My Data compared works through the decision in more detail.
What you need before you start
Enova's Green Button FAQ is specific on this point: to access your data you will need your account number and your meter number. That second item catches people out. The account number is on every bill, but the meter number is not something most finance teams keep at hand, and for a portfolio you need it per site.
It is worth collecting both before you begin rather than starting a download and stopping halfway. If you manage several buildings, build the list first: address, account number, meter number. That list is the thing you will reuse every time, whichever access mode you end up using.
What is in the data
Enova sets out exactly what a customer can choose to share with an authorized third party. You select the data types and the account, and Enova shares only what you authorized:
| Data type | What Enova lists |
|---|---|
| Energy usage data | Historical usage up to a maximum of two years, ongoing meter readings, hourly interval data, and net metering data |
| Utility bill data | Billing periods, energy charges and adjustments |
| Account information | Customer name, service address, mailing address, account number and meter number |
Two details matter for planning. The first is the two-year history limit, which sets how far back a baseline can go from this source alone. If you need a longer baseline, you need another source for the earlier period, and bill digitization is usually how that gap gets filled. The second is that usage and billing data are separate selections. Authorizing usage alone gives you consumption without the charges, which is a common surprise late in a project.
Hourly interval data is the part that makes load analysis possible at all. For what that enables and where the reporting limits are, see submetering and interval data management.
If you are a service provider
Enova runs a registration process for third-party vendors. Its FAQ directs anyone interested in becoming an authorized third-party vendor to review the third-party terms and conditions and then complete the registration form on the vendor registration portal. The FAQ also covers how customers authorize a vendor, how long that access lasts, and how a customer stops sharing.
Plan for that authorization to be revocable and time-bound, because it is. A feed that silently expires looks exactly like a feed that broke, and the fix is a customer action rather than an engineering one. The technical side of that consent flow is covered in OAuth authorization in Green Button Connect My Data.
Suite metering and multi-unit sites
Multi-unit buildings in Enova's territory are a separate case. Enova publishes a suite metering page for developers and contractors, and where suites are individually metered by a sub-metering provider, the consumption behind those suites does not arrive through the building owner's distributor account. Whether you are looking at a single bulk meter or a set of suite meters changes what data exists and who holds it. What is submetering, and when a building needs it explains how to tell which situation you are in.
When one account becomes forty
Everything above is manageable for one building. The effort does not scale linearly, it scales with the number of account and meter pairs and the number of separate authorizations you have to obtain and keep alive. A portfolio spread across Enova, Alectra and Hydro One is three portals, three authorization flows and three sets of quirks, even though the underlying standard is the same.
This is the point where teams either build an integration layer or use one. EZGB collects from Enova Power and more than fifty-five other Ontario distributors, normalizes what comes back, and keeps the authorizations current so a broken feed surfaces as an alert rather than as a gap someone notices a quarter later. The trade-offs of building it yourself are set out in utility data aggregator vs building your own integrations.
If you want to see what that looks like against your own accounts, request a demo and we can walk through a portfolio the size of yours.
Getting it right the first time
- Collect account numbers and meter numbers per site before you touch the portal, because Enova asks for both.
- Decide early whether you need billing data as well as usage, since they are separate authorizations.
- Treat the two-year history limit as a planning constraint, not a surprise.
- Expect authorizations to expire and to need renewal, and monitor for feeds that stop.
- Check whether the building is bulk metered or suite metered before you assume the distributor holds the consumption you want.
For the full list of distributors and what each offers, see utility companies in Ontario. Nearby accounts often have their own walkthroughs: Alectra, London Hydro and Hydro One for electricity, and Enbridge for gas.
Sources
- Enova Power, Green Button: https://enovapower.com/my-account/green-button/
- Enova Power, About Us: https://www.enovapower.com/about-us/
- Enova Power, Suite Metering: https://enovapower.com/developers-and-contractors/suite-metering/
- Green Button Alliance, Connect My Data: https://www.greenbuttonalliance.org/green-button-connect-my-data-cmd
Source: enovapower.com