Getting natural gas, water, and propane data alongside electricity

Most conversations about utility data start and end with electricity. Smart meters, hourly intervals, and Green Button portals were built around it. But a building's energy picture is rarely electricity alone. Heating in most of Canada runs on natural gas or propane, water is metered and billed by a municipality or a local utility, and a greenhouse gas inventory or a benchmark that leaves any of those out is incomplete.

This guide explains how each commodity's data can be obtained in Ontario, which ones fall under the province's Green Button regulation, and how EZGB brings them together with electricity in one standardized dataset. If you are new to the electricity side, start with How to get utility data from Ontario utilities.

Which commodities Green Button covers

The Green Button standard itself is not limited to electricity. The Green Button Alliance describes it as a format for electricity, gas, and water usage in intervals that can be 5-minute, hourly, daily, or monthly, depending on what each provider decides. Connect My Data, the authorized sharing mode, is likewise described as covering electricity, natural gas, or water usage data.

What is regulated in Ontario is narrower. The Ontario Energy Board states that rate-regulated electricity and natural gas utilities were required to provide customers with access to Green Button by November 1, 2023, and the provincial government describes the data as natural gas and hourly electricity usage data. Municipal water systems and propane suppliers are not rate-regulated utilities under that regulation, so they have no Green Button obligation. In practice that gives four different situations, summarized below.

Natural gas: Enbridge Gas Download My Data and Share My Data

Enbridge Gas, the natural gas distributor for much of Ontario, documents its Green Button implementation on its own site. For a one-time export, the customer signs in to My Account, opens the Share My Data section, and selects Download your Data. Enbridge states that the customer can download up to 24 months of energy data, and that the process generates one or two XML files depending on the categories selected: one with account details and one with billing and usage data. The categories offered are Account, Billing, and Usage.

For ongoing sharing, Enbridge's Share My Data process starts with the third party. The customer contacts the third party, receives a link to an authorization form, authenticates either through My Account credentials or with an account number, postal code, and email, then selects the time period, sharing duration, data categories, and accounts to share. Enbridge notes that the third party will only be able to retrieve the data categories that the customer has authorized. Authorizations can be modified or ended in the Share My Data section of My Account or by calling Enbridge at 1-877-362-7434.

Gas data behaves differently from electricity data in two ways worth planning for. First, gas accounts are commonly billed on periodic meter reads rather than hourly intervals, so the usable resolution is often the billing period. Second, gas volumes are billed in cubic metres and converted to energy using a heating value that changes over time, so a dataset that keeps only one of the two will not reconcile with the bill. The GHG side of this is covered in Calculating GHG emissions from utility data.

Water: available from a few utilities, PDF bills everywhere else

Water is the commodity with the most uneven access. In most Ontario municipalities, water is billed by the city or a municipal utility and the only record is the bill. A handful of electricity utilities that also bill water on behalf of their municipality include it in Green Button. London Hydro states that its Green Button platform covers electricity, gas and water-usage data, and notes Download My Data certified since 2015 and Connect My Data since 2022. EPCOR's Ontario Green Button page lists the available readings as hourly interval, demand, net metering and water (if applicable), with historical usage up to a maximum of 2 years in XML.

For everyone else, water data means digitizing the municipal bill. The good news is that water bills are simple documents: a period, a metered volume, a rate, and a total, sometimes with a wastewater charge calculated from the same volume. The validation checklist in How to validate utility bill data extracted from PDF bills applies directly.

Propane and other delivered fuels

Propane, heating oil, and other delivered fuels have no meter reading in the utility sense. The supplier fills a tank and issues an invoice for the litres delivered. That creates a data problem that is different from gas or electricity: a delivery is not consumption. A tank filled on January 30 and again on March 15 tells you how much was bought, not how much was burned in February. For benchmarking and emissions, the usual practice is to treat deliveries as consumption over the period between fills, and to document that assumption, or to use tank level readings where they exist.

Because the only record is the invoice, propane data always comes through bill digitization. EZGB's BillScan reads delivery invoices the same way it reads utility bills, capturing the delivery date, volume, unit price, and total, and keeping each record linked to the original document so the delivery-versus-consumption assumption can be revisited later.

Bringing the commodities into one dataset

The value of multi-commodity data comes from having all of it in the same shape: the same site and account identifiers, the same period conventions, consistent units, and a clear flag for which source each record came from. That is what EZGB (Easy Green Button Connector) is built to produce. It collects consumption and billing data from utilities through authorized utility connections, Green Button Download My Data and Connect My Data, and PDF bill digitization through BillScan, standardizes all of it, and delivers it by API, CSV, or SFTP into ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager, RETScreen, Power BI, or a CRM. RETScreen users in particular need gas and electricity together for a facility model, which is covered in Utility data for RETScreen.

Book a walkthrough at ezgb.ca to see what a combined electricity, gas, and water dataset looks like for one of your sites, and which of your accounts can use an authorized connection versus bill digitization. The trade-offs between the two paths are laid out in Green Button vs PDF bill digitization.

A practical order of operations

1. Inventory every account at each site by commodity, including the municipal water account and any fuel supplier, and note who receives each bill.
2. Set up authorized connections or Green Button for the electricity and gas accounts first; they cover most of the energy and usually have the longest history available.
3. Check whether your electricity utility includes water in its Green Button data; if it does, add water to the same authorization.
4. Route the remaining water bills and all delivered-fuel invoices to bill digitization, with a standing process for new bills as they arrive.
5. Validate periods and units across commodities before loading anything into a reporting tool, and keep the source flag on every record.

Frequently asked questions

Does Green Button in Ontario include natural gas?

Yes. The Ontario Energy Board's requirement covers rate-regulated natural gas utilities as well as electricity distributors, and Enbridge Gas offers both Download My Data and Share My Data through My Account, with up to 24 months of data available for download.

Why is water so often missing from energy datasets?

Because water is usually billed by a municipality that is not covered by the Green Button regulation, so there is no standard export. Unless your electricity utility bills water and includes it in Green Button, the bill is the only record, and it has to be digitized.

How should propane deliveries be treated as consumption?

Spread each delivery across the period since the previous fill, document that assumption, and use tank level readings if you have them. Keep the raw delivery records intact so the method can be changed later without re-entering data.

Can one authorization cover electricity and gas?

Not in Ontario, where electricity and gas are delivered by different utilities with separate portals. Each utility needs its own authorization, which is one reason a connector that manages many authorizations in one place saves so much administrative time.

What resolution can I expect for gas and water?

Usually the billing period, since most gas and water meters are read monthly or bi-monthly rather than hourly. Some utilities provide daily gas reads for larger accounts. Plan your analysis around monthly data for these commodities and hourly data for electricity.

Sources

• Download and share your data (Enbridge Gas)
• Share your energy data with a third party (Enbridge Gas)
• Green Button DMD and CMD (London Hydro)
• Green Button (EPCOR Ontario)
• Green Button (Ontario Energy Board)
• Lower your energy bills with Green Button (Ontario)
• Green Button standard (Green Button Alliance)
• Green Button Connect My Data (Green Button Alliance)