Utility data for hospitals and healthcare facilities in Ontario

A hospital runs around the clock, on several fuels, across buildings added in different decades and metered in different ways. The facilities team has to report energy use every year, publish a conservation plan, defend capital requests, and answer to a board that increasingly asks about emissions. Every one of those tasks starts with the same raw material: complete, consistent electricity, natural gas, steam, and water data for every account the hospital pays.

This guide is for facilities managers, energy managers, and the consultants who support hospitals and other healthcare sites. It covers what data you need, why it is harder to assemble than it looks, and how authorized utility connections, Green Button, and PDF bill digitization can replace the annual scramble through invoices. Organizations like these have recently started using EZGB for exactly this reason.

What Ontario hospitals have to report

Ontario's broader public sector energy reporting rules apply to hospitals alongside municipalities, municipal service boards, school boards, universities, and colleges. Under O. Reg. 25/23, these organizations must report annually on their energy use and greenhouse gas emissions and publish the reports on their websites, and the province publishes the results as an open dataset that also names the organizations that did not report.

The mechanics matter for data planning. The reports are due by July 1 of each reporting year and are submitted through ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager, with no minimum square footage threshold for properties under the prescribed operation types, and the same regulation requires a Conservation and Demand Management plan posted every five years. A hospital therefore needs a full calendar year of consumption for every fuel and every reportable property, reconciled in Portfolio Manager before the summer deadline, and a multi-year history behind it to write a credible five-year plan.

Benchmarking adds a second reason to get the data right. Hospital is one of the 16 property types that can receive a 1-100 ENERGY STAR score in Canada, and the same NRCan guidance says a score requires at least 12 full consecutive calendar months of energy data with meters that account for all energy use for all fuel types. A gap in one gas account or a missing steam meter is enough to invalidate the score for the year.

The data a hospital actually needs

Monthly billing data for every account: consumption, cost, billing period start and end dates, and the rate class, for electricity, natural gas, water, and any delivered fuel such as fuel oil or purchased steam.
Interval electricity data: hourly or 15-minute reads from the utility's smart or interval meters, which show when the load peaks and whether a chiller plant, imaging suite, or air-handling schedule is driving demand charges.
A stable account-to-building map: which utility accounts and meters serve which property, so campus totals and per-building totals both add up.
Multi-year history: at least the two calendar years the reporting cycle asks for, and ideally longer for weather normalization and plan baselines.
Emissions inputs: consumption by fuel in the units your reporting tool expects, so scope 1 and scope 2 figures can be calculated consistently year over year.

Hospitals also carry accounts that are easy to forget: a leased clinic across the street, a parking structure with its own meter, a co-generation interconnection with separate import and export reads. The list has to be complete before collection starts, and the guide on onboarding utility accounts at scale walks through building that inventory.

Why it is harder to assemble than it looks

The first obstacle is fragmentation. A single hospital corporation can be billed by an electricity distributor, a gas distributor, a municipal water department, a steam supplier, and a fuel oil vendor, each with its own portal, statement layout, and units. Bills arrive in accounts payable, not the energy office, and by the time they are pulled for the annual report some months are missing, some are estimates later corrected, and some cover 28 days while others cover 35.

The second obstacle is time. Rekeying a year of invoices for a mid-sized campus is days of work for someone whose real job is maintaining the building. Errors introduced during rekeying then surface in Portfolio Manager, where the Data Quality Checker runs more than 70 checks, and every flagged item has to be traced back to a bill.

The third obstacle is that the manual process produces nothing reusable. Once the report is filed, the spreadsheet goes stale, and the next question from finance means starting again. The Ontario municipalities and public sector guide describes the same pattern; hospitals face it with more fuels and more buildings.

How the data can be obtained without rekeying

Authorized utility connections and Green Button for Ontario accounts

Ontario made this problem tractable. Rate-regulated electricity and natural gas utilities in the province were required to provide Green Button access by November 1, 2023, and the Green Button Alliance reported that 55 Ontario utility platforms were certified, covering nearly 5.4 million electricity customers and over 3.5 million natural gas customers. For a hospital, that means the electricity and gas accounts can be connected once, with the hospital's authorization, and the billing and interval data then arrive in a standard format on an ongoing basis instead of being copied from statements.

There are two Green Button modes. Download My Data is a one-time export from the utility portal; Connect My Data is an authorized, revocable connection that keeps delivering. For an organization with a July 1 deadline every year, the ongoing connection is the one that removes the recurring work. The Connect My Data versus Download My Data guide explains the trade-offs.

PDF bill digitization for everything else

Water, purchased steam, fuel oil, propane, and any account outside Ontario do not come through Green Button. Those bills exist as PDFs, and the practical route is to digitize them: extract the account, period, consumption, and cost fields, validate the results against the previous period, and load them into the same dataset as the connected accounts. This is the part of the job that used to be pure data entry.

What EZGB does

EZGB collects consumption and billing data from utilities through authorized utility connections, Green Button (both Download My Data and Connect My Data), and PDF bill digitization. It standardizes the result into consistent units and fields, so an electricity account from one distributor and a gas account from another line up in the same table. It then delivers that data by API, CSV, or SFTP into ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager, RETScreen, Power BI, and CRMs. EZGB is part of MartinAI, built by Screaming Power. The practical outcome for a hospital is that the annual report becomes an export from a dataset that is already current, rather than a project.

If you are planning next year's reporting cycle, book a walkthrough at ezgb.ca and bring your account list.

What it costs in effort and time

The effort is front-loaded. Building the account inventory and completing the authorizations takes attention from someone who knows the accounts, and for a campus with dozens of meters that is a few working sessions. Ontario electricity and gas accounts that support Connect My Data are the fastest to bring on, because the authorization is a one-time step. PDF accounts take longer at the start because historical statements have to be located and digitized, but once the process is running, each new bill is handled as it arrives.

After onboarding, the ongoing effort drops to review: checking flagged anomalies, confirming a new meter is mapped to the right building, and exporting to Portfolio Manager ahead of the deadline. The first year still involves work; the second year is mostly automatic.

What to do with the data once you have it

File the annual report from a live dataset rather than a spreadsheet rebuilt each spring, and keep the Portfolio Manager records current through the year so the July 1 deadline is an export, not a crunch.
Write the five-year Conservation and Demand Management plan on real baselines, with per-building intensity and interval load shapes that show where the opportunities are.
Calculate emissions consistently using the same consumption data every year; the guide to calculating GHG emissions from utility data covers the method.
Support capital cases for chiller, boiler, lighting, and controls projects with measured before-and-after consumption instead of estimates.
Answer finance and board questions quickly, because the data is already structured and the trend is already visible.

For the mechanics of getting the data into the reporting tool, see the guide on getting utility data into ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager.

Frequently asked questions

Does every Ontario hospital have to report energy use?

Hospitals are among the broader public sector organizations covered by O. Reg. 25/23, and the province's open dataset lists hospitals as a reporting sector. Which properties are in scope depends on the prescribed operation types in the regulation, and the ontario.ca reporting page notes there is no minimum square footage for them, so the reportable list is usually longer than the largest buildings.

Can a hospital get an ENERGY STAR score?

Yes. NRCan lists Hospital among the property types that receive a 1-100 ENERGY STAR score in Canada. The score needs at least 12 full consecutive months of energy data and meters covering all fuel types, which is why complete data collection is the prerequisite rather than an afterthought.

Which accounts can be connected automatically and which need bill digitization?

Electricity and natural gas accounts with Ontario's rate-regulated utilities can generally be connected through Green Button with the hospital's authorization. Water, purchased steam, fuel oil, propane, and accounts outside Ontario usually arrive only as bills, so those are digitized from PDFs. EZGB handles both routes and merges them into one dataset.

Who has to authorize the utility connection?

The customer of record on each utility account, usually the hospital corporation itself, authorizes the connection, and the authorization is revocable at any time through the utility, as the Ontario Energy Board's Green Button page explains. A consultant typically coordinates the authorizations with the hospital's finance or facilities contact.

Does EZGB file the report for us?

No. EZGB provides the standardized data the report needs and delivers it into Portfolio Manager or your own systems. Filing, verification, and the conservation plan itself remain the hospital's responsibility, and we do not make any claim that using EZGB satisfies a regulatory obligation on its own.

Sources

Source: ontario.ca