A retailer or broker lives or dies on the accuracy of a customer's usage profile. Price a contract against the wrong load shape and the margin evaporates. Make an offer without recent consumption and it lands as guesswork. Ask a prospect to dig up twelve months of paper bills and a good share of them never finish enrolment. The common thread is data: getting a clean, recent, standardized view of how a customer actually uses energy, without turning every quote into a research project.
This guide walks through how energy retailers and brokers obtain customer consumption data for pricing, offers, and enrolment, why authorized access matters, and how standardized delivery through an API, CSV, or SFTP turns that data into something your systems can use directly. The framing is Ontario-first, where authorized data access is a regulated norm, but the pattern applies anywhere Green Button is available.
The Data a Retailer or Broker Needs
Quoting and enrolling a customer well takes more than a headline kilowatt-hour total. The useful inputs include:
- Interval usage, so you can see the load shape across hours and seasons rather than a single monthly number.
- Historical consumption over a meaningful window, so seasonal swings and trends are visible.
- Billing history, including charges and read dates, so a quote can be compared against what the customer pays now.
- Account and meter identifiers, so usage ties to the right service point during enrolment.
- Both electricity and natural gas where a customer takes both, so a dual-fuel offer rests on real numbers.
Collected by hand, these inputs arrive as a mix of PDF bills, portal screenshots, and half-remembered figures. That is slow, error-prone, and hostile to conversion. The better path is to get the same information straight from the utility in a standard format, with the customer's permission.
Authorized Access Is the Foundation
Customer energy data belongs to the customer. The right way to obtain it is with their explicit authorization, and Green Button Connect My Data is the mechanism built for exactly this. Through Connect My Data, a customer authorizes a third party to receive their usage information directly from the utility, on an ongoing basis, without having to re-export anything each time. The authorization is revocable, so the customer stays in control.
For a retailer or broker, this changes the enrolment conversation. Instead of asking a prospect to gather documents, you ask them to authorize a connection. Once granted, recent and historical usage flows to you in a standard shape, and you can price against real data in minutes rather than days. For one-time needs, such as a quick baseline at first contact, the customer can also export a Green Button Download My Data file themselves and share it, which is a manual snapshot rather than an ongoing feed.
Treat the authorization itself as part of your compliance posture. Keep a clear record of who consented, to what data, and for what purpose, and honor revocations promptly. Green Button uses the OAuth framework for this, so access is token-based and can be cut off cleanly when a customer withdraws consent.
Why Standardization Matters
Green Button data follows the NAESB ESPI standard, expressed as a consistent XML schema. That means usage from one utility is structured like usage from another. For a retailer operating across a service territory with many utilities, standardization is the difference between one ingestion pipeline and dozens of custom ones. In Ontario, this is reinforced by regulation: Ontario Regulation 633/21 requires electricity and natural gas utilities to provide Green Button Connect My Data and Download My Data access built to the ESPI standard, with the requirement in full effect since November 1, 2023, and the Green Button Alliance has certified utility platforms across the province. Note that it is the utilities' platforms that carry that certification, not the tools that read from them.
The practical payoff is coverage. Across Ontario's 55-plus utilities, a retailer can expect a consistent way to obtain authorized data rather than negotiating a separate arrangement with each one.
Standardized Delivery Into Your Systems
Getting the data is only half the job. It also has to land in your pricing engine, CRM, or enrolment workflow in a form those systems accept. Raw Green Button XML is standardized, but most retail and brokerage systems want data shaped for their own tables and fields. The gap between the two is where a delivery layer earns its keep.
| Delivery method | Good fit for |
|---|---|
| REST API | Real-time quoting and offer engines that pull usage on demand |
| CSV export | Analyst-driven pricing, spreadsheets, and batch review |
| SFTP drop | Scheduled bulk loads into a data warehouse or billing system |
| Embeddable components | Letting a customer authorize a connection inside your own signup flow |
The goal is that your team works with clean, consistent records regardless of which utility a customer belongs to or how their data first arrived. Interval reads, billing history, and account identifiers should show up in predictable fields so your pricing logic can consume them without special-casing each source.
Filling the Gaps With Bill Digitization
Not every account will have a live Green Button connection on day one, and some historical bills may predate any connection. This is where PDF bill digitization helps. Turning PDF and paper bills into the same structured data means a prospect can share recent statements to get a fast baseline, and you can backfill history that an authorized feed alone would not cover. Combined with authorized connections, digitization gives you a complete picture instead of a partial one.
Putting It Together for Faster Enrolment
- At first contact, capture a quick baseline from a shared bill or a Download My Data export.
- During enrolment, have the customer authorize a Connect My Data feed so usage stays current.
- Standardize everything into consistent records, whether it came from an API, a file, or a scanned bill.
- Deliver those records into your pricing and enrolment systems by API, CSV, or SFTP.
- Keep a clean consent trail and honor any revocation without delay.
The result is a quoting process that runs on real load shapes, offers that reflect a customer's actual usage, and an enrolment flow that does not stall while someone hunts for old bills.
Get Started
EZGB gathers customer consumption and billing data through authorized Green Button connections and bill digitization, then delivers it clean by API, CSV, or SFTP, so your pricing, offer, and enrolment systems get standardized data from across Ontario's utilities and beyond. If you are a retailer or broker who wants to quote on real usage instead of guesswork, book a walkthrough or start a pilot from the pricing and signup pages at ezgb.ca, and we will help you connect the accounts you serve.
Sources
- Green Button Connect My Data (CMD), Green Button Alliance: https://www.greenbuttonalliance.org/green-button-connect-my-data-cmd
- Ontario Regulation 633/21, Energy Data, CanLII: https://www.canlii.org/en/on/laws/regu/o-reg-633-21/latest/o-reg-633-21.html
- Green Button Alliance announces 55 Ontario utilities' platforms certified: https://www.greenbuttonalliance.org/news/green-button-alliance-announces-55-ontario-based-utilities-platforms-are-now-green-button-certified
- Green Button Standard and NAESB ESPI technical information: https://www.greenbuttonalliance.org/technical-info
Source: greenbuttonalliance.org