An Ontario school board energy manager has an unusual data problem. The board may run 50 to 150 buildings, but the accounts behind them are spread across a rural electricity distributor, one or more municipal distributors, a gas utility, several water utilities and portables that appear and disappear from year to year. The province asks for one report on all of it, once a year, in ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager, and the board wants the same data in Power BI or Fabric so trustees and the facilities team can see where the money goes.
This guide covers what the broader public sector energy reporting rules require of school boards, why multi-distributor collection is the hard part, what interval data adds for schools, and a practical data flow into Power BI and Portfolio Manager, ending with a checklist for the person who owns the July submission. Regulatory facts come from the Government of Ontario's own pages, linked where used; nothing here is legal advice.
What O. Reg. 25/23 requires of school boards
Ontario's broader public sector (BPS) energy reporting program is set out in O. Reg. 25/23 under the Electricity Act, 1998. The province's broader public sector energy reporting page says that BPS organizations, including school boards, municipalities and municipal service boards, must report by July 1 of each reporting year, and that reporting is done through ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager, which replaced the earlier SharePoint portal. The open data page for the program adds that municipalities, municipal service boards, school boards, universities, colleges and hospitals are the organizations required to report, and that the published dataset covers energy use and greenhouse gas emissions from 2011 through 2024, updated yearly.
Three details matter for school boards in particular:
- Reporting period. The province's page states that energy consumption is reported for the calendar year, except that school boards report by school year, September 1 to August 31. Utility data therefore has to be cut at the end of August.
- Portables. The provincial guide says gross floor area is reported for every property, and that school boards are additionally required to report the number of portables for each property, which changes every year.
- Operation types. The guide's list of operation types gives school boards three: administrative offices and related facilities, schools (mapped to K-12 school in Portfolio Manager), and other education facilities.
The regulation also covers Conservation and Demand Management (CDM) plans: the provincial page says organizations must post their CDM plans on their websites, and that the plans are completed every five years, with the previous plan due in 2019 and the next in July 2024. Annual reports are not required to be posted publicly, but the ministry publishes the combined dataset and notes that missing or incorrect data is the sole responsibility of the BPS organization.
What has to be in the report
The provincial guide says a board must report all energy used at each property. Its information you need for reporting section lists electricity and natural gas but also diesel, fuel oil, district energy, wood and others, taken from utility bills and fuel invoices; it says electricity and natural gas utilities are required to provide aggregated monthly data for your building, and recommends contacting utilities in writing early in the new year. Before submitting, the how to report section says to run the Portfolio Manager Data Quality Checker from the property's Summary tab, which catches the gaps and overlaps that appear when a year of bills from five utilities is keyed in by hand. Our guide on getting utility data into ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager covers meters, bill periods and upload options.
The multi-distributor problem
Most Ontario boards do not deal with one electricity utility. A county-wide board typically has town schools served by a municipal distributor and township schools served by Hydro One, which describes its service territory as approximately 75 per cent of the geographic area of Ontario. A board spanning two or three counties can have three or four electricity distributors, plus Enbridge Gas or EPCOR Natural Gas (the Ontario Energy Board sets rates for those two natural gas utilities), plus a different water utility in every town, each with its own portal, bill layout and billing period.
Multiply that by meters: secondary schools often have more than one electricity account, and a board with 80 schools can land at several hundred meters across gas, electricity and water. The energy manager's real job is keeping the mapping between meters, accounts, buildings and Portfolio Manager property IDs correct as the portfolio changes.
| Data source | What it gives you | Friction for a board |
|---|---|---|
| Municipal electricity distributor | Monthly bills; hourly interval data through Green Button | One login per distributor |
| Hydro One (rural schools) | Monthly bills; interval data through myAccount or its Interval Data Portal | Many accounts, separate portal |
| Enbridge Gas or EPCOR Natural Gas | Billed consumption in cubic metres | Read cycles do not match calendar months |
| Municipal water utilities | Quarterly or monthly PDF bills | No Green Button; manual extraction |
| Propane and oil suppliers | Delivery invoices | Deliveries, not consumption |
The good news is that Green Button now exists at every rate-regulated distributor. The OEB states that rate-regulated electricity and natural gas utilities were required to provide access to Green Button by November 1, 2023, and the province describes the result as natural gas and hourly electricity usage data in a standardized format with the option to authorize automatic transfer to an application. Our guide on utility data for Ontario municipalities and the public sector covers the same mechanics from the municipal side. Water utilities are outside that regulation, which is why PDF bill digitization still matters.
What interval data adds for schools
Annual reporting only needs monthly totals. Interval data is where an energy manager finds savings, and schools suit it because their schedules are so predictable. Described qualitatively, since the numbers differ at every site:
- Unoccupied-hours baseload. A school is empty most nights, all weekend and for two months in summer. Hourly data shows what the building draws at 2 a.m. on a Sunday in July; if that is a large share of the daytime load, something is running that does not need to be, such as ventilation on a bad schedule or hot water recirculation.
- Peak demand. Larger schools pay demand charges. Interval data shows whether the monthly peak is a predictable morning warm-up or a few hours when kitchen, gym and chillers coincide, which is the difference between a control fix and a capital project. See using interval data to manage commercial demand charges.
- Portables and schedule drift. Where a portable cluster has its own service, interval data shows whether setback is happening. Comparing hourly profiles across schools on the same holiday is the fastest way to spot the one that stayed in occupied mode.
The annual filing itself only needs consumption totals by meter; interval data serves the CDM plan and the savings work. Our comparison of interval data versus billing data lays out which use cases need which.
Data flow into Power BI and Fabric
Boards increasingly want energy data in the same Power BI or Fabric environment as their facilities, HR and finance data. Microsoft's list of data sources in Power BI Desktop includes, under File, Excel workbooks, Text/CSV, XML, JSON, Folder and SharePoint folder; under Database, SQL Server, PostgreSQL and others; under Microsoft Fabric, Dataflows, Warehouses and Lakehouses; and under Other, Web and OData feeds. Any of those can be the landing point: CSV files dropped into a SharePoint folder for a small board, a SQL staging table loaded by SFTP or an API client for a board with a data team, or a Fabric Lakehouse fed through a Dataflow. The question is which one you can keep fed every month without a person doing it.
Whatever the landing point, the model should be the same: a meters table (meter ID, commodity, unit, account, building, Portfolio Manager property ID, distributor), a readings table (meter ID, interval start and end, value, quality flag) and a bills table (account, period, consumption, cost). Green Button XML and PDF bills do not arrive in that shape, so a parsing and normalization step sits between the utility and Power BI. Our guide on utility data in Power BI covers the model and the refresh schedule.
For Portfolio Manager, Natural Resources Canada's benchmarking FAQ describes three ways to enter data: manual entry, spreadsheet upload using the tool's templates, and data exchange through Portfolio Manager web services, where a utility's or service provider's database interacts directly with Portfolio Manager. The same FAQ notes that K-12 schools are eligible for a 1 to 100 ENERGY STAR score when they meet the size and hours-of-operation conditions listed there. For a board, the practical choice is between spreadsheet uploads built from the same standardized data you feed to Power BI, or a web-services connection that pushes the meter entries for you.
Checklist for the board's energy manager
- Build the meter inventory first: every electricity, gas, water and other-fuel account, mapped to a building and a Portfolio Manager property, including portables with their own service.
- Identify every distributor in the inventory and how each delivers data: Green Button Download My Data, Connect My Data, a portal export, or PDF bills only.
- Set the reporting cut at August 31 and enter actual bill periods so Portfolio Manager prorates the ones that straddle the cut.
- Contact utilities in writing early in the new year for any monthly data you cannot pull yourself, and update gross floor area and portable counts for every property, since both change year to year.
- Run the Data Quality Checker in Portfolio Manager on every property and clear the gaps and overlaps before July 1.
- Keep the same standardized dataset flowing into Power BI so trustees and principals see the same numbers the ministry sees, and check that it supports the targets in the CDM plan posted on the board's website.
Frequently asked questions
Does O. Reg. 25/23 apply to every school in a board?
The province's page says organizations report properties that meet the prescribed operation types in Table 1 of O. Reg. 25/23, and that no minimum square footage applies. For school boards the guide lists administrative offices, schools and other education facilities.
Why do school boards report on a different period from municipalities?
The provincial reporting page states that energy consumption is reported for the calendar year except for school boards, which report by school year from September 1 to August 31. This aligns the report with how schools are actually occupied, but it means utility data has to be split at the end of August.
Can utilities send data straight into Portfolio Manager?
Natural Resources Canada's FAQ describes data exchange through Portfolio Manager web services as a way for a utility or service provider's database to interact directly with Portfolio Manager. Few Ontario distributors offer it, so boards generally use spreadsheet uploads or a service provider connection.
How EZGB fits
EZGB collects billing and interval meter data from Ontario electricity and natural gas utilities through authorized utility connections and Green Button (Download My Data and Connect My Data), and uses BillScan to digitize the PDF bills that water utilities and fuel suppliers still send. Collection runs on a schedule, typically daily, through automated bill and meter data retrieval, and the data is normalized into consistent meters, periods and units. Delivery is by REST API, SFTP, JSON or CSV, which maps onto the Power BI landing points above and onto Portfolio Manager spreadsheet uploads. How EZGB works describes the pipeline, and EZGB pricing lists the plans.
If your board is planning a Power BI or Fabric energy dashboard, or is tired of assembling the July submission from PDFs, the quickest way to judge the fit is to see your own schools' data come through: bring a list of your distributors and a few sample accounts and we will show the meter inventory, the interval data and the export formats. Request a demo on the pricing page.
Sources
- Broader public sector energy reporting (Government of Ontario)
- Energy use and greenhouse gas emissions for the Broader Public Sector (Ontario Data Catalogue)
- Guide to energy reporting: what you are required to report (Government of Ontario)
- Guide to energy reporting: information you need for reporting (Government of Ontario)
- Guide to energy reporting: how to report (Government of Ontario)
- Guide to energy reporting: list of operation types (Government of Ontario)
- Benchmarking frequently asked questions (Natural Resources Canada)
- Data sources in Power BI Desktop (Microsoft Learn)
- Green Button (Ontario Energy Board)
- Natural gas rates (Ontario Energy Board)
Source: ontario.ca