The hardest part of running an energy program is rarely the analysis. It is getting the raw data through the door. Anyone who needs consumption history for a few hundred meters knows the routine: log into one utility portal after another, download spreadsheets or PDF bills, rename files, and reconcile mismatched formats before the real work can start. Multiply that by a full portfolio and the onboarding phase becomes the project.
The size of the task follows the shape of the grid. The U.S. Energy Information Administration counted almost 3,000 electric distribution utilities operating in the United States in 2017, each with its own web portal, login process, billing layout, and export options. A national portfolio can touch dozens of them. Collecting every account by hand does not scale past a small building count, and the manual approach quietly caps how large a program can grow.
Why manual onboarding stalls
Manual collection fails for reasons that compound as account counts rise:
- Credential sprawl: every utility portal needs its own login, and access is often tied to whoever set up the account rather than the team that needs the data.
- Format drift: one utility exports CSV, another only PDF bills, a third offers an XML download with a different field layout. Normalizing these by hand is slow and error prone.
- Coverage gaps: a single missed download leaves a hole in the consumption history that is easy to overlook until a report is already wrong.
- No refresh: a one-time export is stale the next month, so the whole cycle repeats.
The data already exists. Access is the bottleneck
Modern metering means the underlying interval data is usually already recorded. The EIA reports that U.S. utilities had about 119 million advanced (smart) metering infrastructure installations in 2022, roughly 72 percent of all electric meter installations. Those meters record usage at a minimum of hourly intervals and make the readings available to the utility and the customer at least once a day. The consumption record is granular and current. The problem is not measurement, it is getting a standardized copy of that data out of each utility efficiently.
It is also rarely just electricity. A single site often has a separate natural gas account, sometimes with a different utility entirely, and water on top of that. Each commodity has its own account number, its own portal, and its own bill layout. A portfolio that looks like a few hundred meters on paper can be a few hundred logins in practice, which is why the onboarding effort tends to scale faster than the building count itself.
Who feels the onboarding crunch
The pain lands hardest on the teams whose work only begins once the data is in hand. Property and portfolio managers need current usage across many tenants and sites to track budgets and spot anomalies. Energy consultants inherit a new client's entire account list on day one and cannot bill for analysis until the history is loaded. Software teams building energy products need a dependable supply of consumption data before a single feature works. In each case the onboarding phase is pure overhead, and every hour spent downloading files is an hour not spent on the work the customer is actually paying for.
Green Button gives the data a common language
Green Button is the North American standard built to solve exactly this. It is based on the NAESB Energy Services Provider Interface (ESPI) and comes in two forms. Download My Data (DMD) lets a customer export their own usage as a standardized XML file. Connect My Data (CMD) authorizes an ongoing, automated feed from the utility to a third party through an API. Because the format is standardized, data from many different utilities arrives in the same structure.
Adoption is moving from voluntary to required in some jurisdictions. Ontario's Energy Data Regulation, O. Reg. 633/21, requires electric and natural gas utilities across the province to implement both Green Button CMD and DMD and to have those platforms certified by the Green Button Alliance. By November 2, 2023, the Alliance had certified 55 Ontario utility platforms against the NAESB REQ.21 ESPI version 3.3 standard. Where Green Button is available, bulk onboarding gets much simpler, because the access method and the file format are consistent across utilities.
How EZGB handles bulk onboarding
EZGB (Easy Green Button Connector) is built around this multi-utility reality. Instead of onboarding accounts one portal at a time, it collects across many utilities through a single connector.
- Green Button DMD and CMD: EZGB retrieves standardized usage exports and can set up ongoing CMD feeds so data keeps flowing after the first pull.
- Multi-utility collection: one workflow spans many utilities rather than a separate manual process for each portal.
- Bill digitization: for accounts at utilities that do not offer Green Button, EZGB turns PDF bills into structured data, so those meters do not become blind spots.
- API and ongoing feed: once an account is connected, new data arrives on a schedule instead of requiring a fresh manual download every billing cycle.
The practical effect is that onboarding shifts from a per-building chore to a repeatable process. A consultant bringing on a new client, or a software team backfilling history for a portfolio, works from one standardized stream rather than reconciling dozens of export formats.
What an onboarding run actually involves
Onboarding is usually described as a single step. In practice it is three distinct jobs, and teams underestimate the first one almost every time. Knowing what each account needs before you start is the difference between a two week run and a six month one.
| Stage | The work | What holds it up |
|---|---|---|
| Inventory | List every utility, account number, service address, meter and commodity in scope | Account numbers live in finance systems, property records and old spreadsheets that disagree with each other |
| Authorization | Establish the right access route for each account, whether that is an authorized connection, a portal export or bill collection | Whoever holds the utility login has left, or the account is in a former owner's name |
| Verification | Confirm the data arriving matches the account and the period it claims to cover | Nobody checks, so a gap or a duplicated period is found months later in a report |
The inventory stage is where portfolios stall. A building that changed hands, a tenant account paid by the landlord, a gas account under a different legal entity: each one is a small piece of detective work, and none of it is technical. It is worth doing that reconciliation deliberately at the start rather than discovering it account by account as failures arrive.
What to settle before the first batch
- Which commodities are in scope. Electricity alone is rarely enough for reporting. Gas, water and propane usually sit on separate accounts with separate access routes, as covered in getting natural gas, water and propane data alongside electricity.
- How far back you need history. Benchmarking and baselines usually need at least 12 months. That constraint changes which access route works, because a live feed does not retroactively produce last year.
- Who can authorize. The person who can grant access is often not the person running the energy programme. Identifying them early saves weeks.
- Where the data has to land. A feed nobody can load into the reporting tool is not finished work. The delivery options are compared in how to receive utility data: API, SFTP or CSV.
- What counts as done. Agree the check that closes an account out, so verification is a step rather than an assumption.
A sensible onboarding sequence
For a large batch of accounts, a staged approach keeps the work orderly:
- Inventory the accounts: list every utility, account number, and meter, and note which utilities offer Green Button.
- Collect authorizations: gather the customer consent needed for DMD exports or CMD feeds, since the account holder controls access to their own data.
- Pull history first: retrieve the available back history so analysis has a baseline before the ongoing feed takes over.
- Fill gaps with bill digitization: for utilities without Green Button, digitize PDF bills to cover those accounts.
- Switch on the ongoing feed: move connected accounts to CMD or a scheduled pull so the dataset stays current without repeat manual work.
EZGB is built for this shape of work: you provide the account list once, and we handle the per utility access, the standardized output and the ongoing collection. See the utilities we already cover and per meter pricing.
Onboarding hundreds of accounts is a data logistics problem more than an analytical one. The measurements already exist in modern meters, and Green Button gives them a shared structure. The work that remains is collecting consistently across many utilities and keeping the feed alive after the first pull, which is where a multi-utility connector earns its place in the workflow.
Source: greenbuttonalliance.org