Utility data for non-profit and affordable housing providers

Non-profit and affordable housing providers carry a particular kind of utility burden. Energy is often one of the largest controllable operating costs, the buildings are frequently older, and the staff who manage them are stretched across property management, tenant services, and funding applications. Every retrofit program, benchmarking requirement, and budget review asks the same first question: what does each building actually consume, month by month, for every fuel?

This guide is written for housing co-operatives, non-profit housing corporations, municipal and community housing providers, and the consultants who help them. It sets out the data these organizations need, why it is unusually hard to collect in a portfolio of mixed-age buildings, and how authorized utility connections, Green Button, and PDF bill digitization can replace the annual bill hunt. Organizations like these have recently started using EZGB for exactly this work.

Why the data question comes up so often

Retrofit funding is the most common trigger. CMHC's Canada Greener Affordable Housing program funds deep energy retrofits of existing multi-unit residential buildings that are primarily residential with at least 5 units or beds and at least 20 years old, with applicants meeting affordability criteria. The same program page describes pre-retrofit funding of up to $130,000 per project for energy audits, modelling studies, and building assessments, and retrofit funding of up to $170,000 per unit. It also notes that the application portal is currently closed because applications have fully committed the budget, which is a reminder that funding windows open and close and the organizations ready with data are the ones that can move when they do.

Every audit or modelling study in that pre-retrofit stage starts from historical consumption. An auditor cannot size a heating retrofit or estimate savings without a year or more of gas and electricity data per building, and the energy model is only as credible as the baseline it is calibrated to. The related guide on utility data for RETScreen describes what a feasibility model expects to receive.

Benchmarking is the second trigger. In Ontario, owners of large buildings must report energy and water use once a year by July 1 for buildings 50,000 square feet and larger, covering all forms of energy the building uses plus water, through ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager. Buildings of 100,000 square feet or more need a certified professional to verify the reported information before submission. Larger housing providers with high-rise towers fall inside this requirement, and Multifamily Housing is one of the 16 property types that can receive a 1-100 ENERGY STAR score in Canada, provided there are at least 12 full consecutive months of data covering all fuels.

The third trigger is the budget. Boards and funders ask why utility costs rose and whether a building is an outlier, and neither question can be answered from a ledger that records amounts paid but not kilowatt-hours or cubic metres.

The data a housing provider needs

Whole-building consumption by fuel: electricity, natural gas, water, and any delivered fuel, per building, per month, in consistent units.
Cost alongside consumption: so that rate effects and consumption effects can be separated when a bill goes up.
Bulk-metered and suite-metered accounts, distinguished: many providers pay the house meter and the common areas while tenants pay their own suites, and the building total depends on both.
A clean account-to-building map: which meters and accounts belong to which address, including accounts inherited from previous owners or managers.
A multi-year history: for weather normalization, for retrofit baselines, and for showing a funder that savings claims are grounded in measured use.

Why it is harder in housing than in commercial portfolios

The first complication is the tenant. Where suites are individually metered, each resident is the utility's customer of record, and NRCan's guidance on whole-building data makes the consequence explicit: the building owner is considered a third party and obtaining complete consumption data for the entire building may be functionally impossible for owners of large multi-tenant or multifamily properties. The same guidance describes how utilities that provide aggregated whole-building totals apply thresholds in the range of 10 customers or more, or a 4/50 rule where a property must have four or more customers and no single one accounts for 50 percent or more of consumption.

The second complication is portfolio history. Housing providers accumulate buildings through transfers, mergers, and municipal programs, so the account list is rarely tidy: some accounts sit in a former management company's name, some bills go to a regional office, and some are paid by a contracted property manager. Assembling the inventory is a project in itself, which is why the onboarding utility accounts at scale guide treats it as the first deliverable.

The third complication is capacity. A small non-profit may have one person responsible for maintenance, capital planning, and funding applications, and rekeying two years of bills across a dozen buildings does not fit between those jobs. Done under deadline pressure, the errors follow the data into the audit and the application.

How the data can be obtained

Authorized utility connections and Green Button in Ontario

For house meters and common-area accounts in Ontario, the provider itself is the customer of record, so it can authorize a Green Button connection directly. The province required most regulated electricity and natural gas utilities to offer Green Button by November 1, 2023, giving customers access to natural gas and hourly electricity usage data in a standardized format and the ability to authorize automatic transfer to applications of their choice. Once the provider authorizes a Connect My Data connection for an account, billing and interval data continue to arrive without anyone downloading anything. The Ontario Green Button regulation explainer covers what the regulation does and does not require.

PDF bill digitization for water, delivered fuels, and older records

Municipal water bills, fuel oil and propane deliveries, accounts outside Ontario, and history older than the portal retains do not come through Green Button. Those records exist as PDFs or scans, and the practical route is to digitize them: extract the account, period, consumption, and cost, validate against surrounding periods, and load them into the same dataset as the connected accounts. Green Button versus PDF bill digitization explains when each method applies.

What EZGB does

EZGB collects consumption and billing data from utilities through authorized utility connections, Green Button (Download My Data and Connect My Data), and PDF bill digitization. It standardizes the result into consistent units and fields across every utility and fuel, and delivers it by API, CSV, or SFTP into ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager, RETScreen, Power BI, and CRMs. EZGB is part of MartinAI, built by Screaming Power. For a housing provider, the point is that the same dataset serves the funding application, the benchmarking submission, and the budget review, and it stays current after the first one is done.

If a funding window is coming and your baseline data is scattered, the quickest way to find out which accounts can be connected is to go through the list with us. Book a walkthrough at ezgb.ca.

What it costs in effort and time

Expect the effort to be concentrated at the start. Building the account inventory takes input from whoever pays the bills, and the authorizations need a signatory with authority over the accounts. Ontario electricity and gas accounts with Connect My Data are the quickest, because the authorization is a one-time step. Water and delivered-fuel accounts take longer because historical statements have to be found and digitized, and a portfolio with many ownership changes will have gaps to chase.

After onboarding, the work shifts to review: checking anomalies, confirming new accounts are mapped correctly, and exporting for whichever report is due. The first year is not effortless; the second application, the second benchmarking cycle, and the next board question draw on data that already exists.

What to do with the data once you have it

Prioritize buildings for retrofit by energy intensity per unit or per square metre, so audit dollars go where the savings are.
Supply auditors and modellers with a clean baseline instead of a folder of bills, and shorten the pre-retrofit phase.
Report benchmarking data on time for buildings inside the Ontario threshold, with the data already in Portfolio Manager form.
Track savings after a retrofit against measured consumption, which is what a funder will want to see in the post-project report.
Budget with consumption, not just cost, so rate changes and usage changes can be explained separately to the board.

The mechanics of moving the data across a portfolio are covered in collecting utility data across a property portfolio, and the Portfolio Manager path in getting utility data into ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager.

Frequently asked questions

Can we get tenants' suite consumption for a whole-building total?

Not directly, unless each tenant authorizes it. Tenants are the customers of record for their own suites. Some utilities provide aggregated whole-building totals to owners once a privacy threshold is met, as NRCan's guidance describes, and where that is available it is the practical route. Otherwise the building total is built from the accounts the provider holds plus whatever aggregated data the utility can supply.

Do small non-profits with a few buildings need this?

The benchmarking threshold in Ontario applies to buildings of 50,000 square feet and larger, so many smaller providers are outside it. Retrofit funding and budgeting still depend on consumption data, though, and a small portfolio with paper bills is exactly where a few hours of monthly rekeying quietly becomes a recurring cost.

Which accounts can be connected automatically?

Electricity and natural gas accounts with Ontario's rate-regulated utilities can generally be connected through Green Button once the provider authorizes them. Water, fuel oil, propane, and accounts in other provinces usually arrive only as bills and are digitized from PDFs. EZGB handles both and merges them into one dataset.

Does this replace an energy audit?

No. An audit still involves a site visit, equipment inventory, and engineering judgment. What changes is that the auditor starts with a clean, complete baseline instead of spending the first week reconstructing one.

Does using EZGB satisfy a funding program's data requirements?

EZGB provides the consumption and billing data in a structured form. Whether a particular program accepts it, and in what format, is determined by that program, and we make no claim of approval by, or affiliation with, any funder or utility. What we can do is deliver the data in the formats those programs and their consultants commonly work from.

Sources

Source: cmhc-schl.gc.ca