How to get utility data in BC, Alberta, and Quebec

Ontario's Green Button regulation makes the province the easiest place in Canada to get standardized utility data. Cross a provincial border and the picture changes. British Columbia, Alberta, and Quebec have no equivalent mandate, and each major utility has its own portal, its own export format, and its own rules about who can request data on a customer's behalf.

This guide documents what each utility's own public pages say about accessing consumption data, so you know what to expect before you start onboarding accounts in those provinces. It complements the broader Green Button availability in North America overview and the Ontario-specific guide, How to get utility data from Ontario utilities.

The Green Button situation outside Ontario

The Green Button Alliance maintains a page on Canadian initiatives. It records that Ontario mandated Green Button for the majority of electricity and natural gas distributors, that Nova Scotia passed Bill 145 in April 2022 requiring Nova Scotia Power to implement the standard, and that Nova Scotia Power achieved Download My Data certification in May 2023. For British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and the other Atlantic provinces, the Alliance states that it currently has no information about Green Button deployments, noting only informal discussions in Alberta.

That does not mean the data is unavailable. It means the data comes out of each utility's customer portal in the utility's own format, usually a spreadsheet or a text file, and that an ongoing authorized feed of the kind Connect My Data provides in Ontario does not exist. The table below summarizes what each utility says.

British Columbia: BC Hydro and FortisBC

BC Hydro

BC Hydro's MyHydro portal is the main source for electricity consumption data in most of the province. For a single account, BC Hydro directs customers to log in and select either View detailed consumption or Data download centre. The utility states that for residential and small commercial meters, consumption is usually presented in one-hour intervals, the shortest interval available for those meters, or for the duration of the billing period. On its usage tracking page BC Hydro describes hourly data as available up to the previous day, alongside daily and weekly views.

Multi-unit buildings are handled differently. Where a building has multiple owners, BC Hydro asks the requester to submit a building data request form and then sends a report with the requested data. The same page notes that BC Hydro may ask authentication questions or request proof that a contractor or consultant is working on behalf of the customer. For consultants and property managers this means the customer's cooperation is needed for each account, and the turnaround is set by BC Hydro's processing rather than by an API.

FortisBC

FortisBC serves electricity in the southern interior and natural gas across much of the province. Its public description of Account Online is brief: customers can review billing information and energy usage, sign up for paperless billing, and apply for rebates. FortisBC does not publish interval resolution or history length on that page, so treat the bill as the reliable record for FortisBC gas accounts and confirm what the portal offers for a given electricity account during onboarding.

Alberta: ENMAX, EPCOR, and the retail market

Alberta's electricity market separates the wires owner from the retailer, so the company that bills a customer is often not the company that owns the meter. That matters for data access: the consumption record sits with the distribution utility, while the bill comes from a retailer chosen by the customer.

ENMAX Power, the distribution utility in Calgary, is replacing older meters under its Advanced Metering Infrastructure program. Its public page states that the new meters communicate wirelessly with routers on street lights and transmit consumption data every four hours, and that the data collected is limited to the meter number and electricity usage, encrypted before transmission. The page does not describe a customer-facing interval data export, so for now the practical sources in Calgary remain the retailer's bill and whatever usage view the retailer's account portal provides.

EPCOR, headquartered in Edmonton, publishes a Green Button page for the Ontario service areas it operates. That page describes hourly interval data in XML with up to two years of history, but that is an Ontario offering under Ontario's regulation; the Green Button Alliance lists no confirmed Alberta deployment. As with ENMAX, bills from the retailer are the dependable Alberta record, and bill digitization is the way to turn them into data.

Quebec: Hydro-Quebec and Energir

Hydro-Quebec

Hydro-Quebec's Customer Space offers the richest self-serve data outside Ontario. For business customers, the utility states that the consumption profile provides up to two years of power and energy use data by the hour, day, and consumption period, with export to a spreadsheet covering either all consumption periods or the available bills, together with daily or hourly consumption. Two limits are stated on the same page: the data download is unavailable to customers who are billed for power demand, and Rate L and LG customers track consumption through the separate VigieLigne service and must contact their commercial officer to set up a Customer Space.

Residential customers see the same kind of profile. Hydro-Quebec notes that customers can track electricity use to the hour thanks to communicating meters, view hourly, daily, monthly, and yearly data, and compare two years of monthly or daily use with the corresponding outdoor temperatures.

Energir

Energir is Quebec's main natural gas distributor. In its Customer Space bulletin for major industries, the company states that the Consumption section holds energy consumption data for the last five years, including daily consumption for customers at rates D4 and D5, with the option to export to Excel. The export includes the calorific power of the gas, which is the conversion factor needed to move from cubic metres to energy.

What this means for a multi-province portfolio

Three practical consequences follow from the utility pages above.

• There is no ongoing authorized feed outside Ontario and Nova Scotia. Portal exports are manual and account by account. Budget staff time or use a service that handles the exports for you, and expect to repeat the process on a schedule.
• Resolution and history differ by utility. Hourly data with two years of history from Hydro-Quebec, five years of monthly or daily gas from Energir, hourly from BC Hydro, and billing-period data elsewhere. A portfolio dataset has to record the resolution of each source rather than assuming one.
• Bills are the common denominator. Every account in every province produces a bill. Digitizing bills gives a consistent baseline across provinces, with portal exports layered on top where a utility offers finer data.

EZGB (Easy Green Button Connector) is built for exactly this mix. It collects consumption and billing data from utilities through authorized utility connections and Green Button where those exist, and through PDF bill digitization with BillScan where they do not, then standardizes everything into one dataset delivered by API, CSV, or SFTP into ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager, RETScreen, Power BI, or a CRM. Book a walkthrough at ezgb.ca to map your accounts by province and see which path each one takes. For the general approach to a scattered portfolio, see Collecting utility data across a property portfolio, and for the trade-offs between the two paths, Green Button vs PDF bill digitization.

Frequently asked questions

Is Green Button available anywhere in Canada outside Ontario?

Nova Scotia is the other province with a legislated requirement, and Nova Scotia Power has a certified Download My Data implementation. The Green Button Alliance reports no confirmed deployments in British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec, Manitoba, or Saskatchewan.

Can a consultant pull BC Hydro data on a client's behalf?

BC Hydro's page on building and strata data says it may request proof that a contractor or consultant is working for the customer, and multi-owner buildings go through a building data request form. Plan on involving the account holder for each request.

Why can some Hydro-Quebec customers not download their data?

Hydro-Quebec states that the download feature is unavailable to customers billed for power demand, and that Rate L and LG customers use the VigieLigne service instead. Large commercial and industrial accounts therefore need a different route, usually the bill plus VigieLigne reports.

Does Alberta's smart meter rollout mean interval data is coming?

ENMAX's meters transmit consumption every four hours, but its public program page does not describe a customer export of that data. Until a utility or the retailer publishes one, the bill remains the record to work from.

How does EZGB handle a portfolio that spans Ontario and other provinces?

Ontario accounts use authorized connections and Green Button; accounts elsewhere use portal exports where available and bill digitization for the rest. All of it lands in the same standardized format with a source flag on each record, so downstream tools see one dataset.

Sources

• Canadian initiatives (Green Button Alliance)
• Access your building or strata's electricity use history (BC Hydro)
• Track and manage your electricity use online (BC Hydro)
• My energy use (FortisBC)
• Advanced Metering Infrastructure program (ENMAX Power)
• Your consumption profile, business (Hydro-Quebec)
• My Consumption Profile, residential (Hydro-Quebec)
• Customer Space, Blue bulletin November 2023 (Energir)